Fenton Johnson is the author of At the Center of All Beauty: Solitude and the Creative Life, a meditation on the solitary artists, writers, and musicians who have inspired him and on the importance of solitude in contemporary life. He is the author of three novels: The Man Who Loved Birds, the award-winning Scissors, Paper, Rock, and Crossing the River, each recently reissued in new editions. He has published as well Geography of the Heart: A Memoir and Keeping Faith: A Skeptic’s Journey among Christian and Buddhist Monks. His collection Everywhere Home: A Life in Essays was selected for the Bruckheimer Series in Kentucky Literature.
Geography received the American Library Association and Lambda Literary Awards for best LGBT Creative Nonfiction, while Keeping Faith received a Lambda Literary and Kentucky Literary Award in Creative Nonfiction. Johnson has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He was recently featured on Terry Gross’s Fresh Air and writes regularly for Harper’s Magazine.
He is professor emeritus at the University of Arizona and teaches creative writing workshops nationally. He is on the faculty of the low-residency creative writing program of Spalding University.
At MacDowell, he worked on the final draft of his book Facing Home: A Skeptic's Journey in Faith
