Poetry. RED SUMMER, Amaud Jamaul Johnson's haunting debut collection, explores a rash of race riots that swept the United States during the summer of 1919. With a tender lyrical quality, reminiscent of the blues, Johnson moves through trauma and personal catastrophe to champion the endurance of the human spirit: "Come, look at him, at all his goods,/ how his whole body becomes song,/ an aria of light, a psalm's kaleidoscope." "Johnson's RED SUMMER startles and impresses with its sheer range of vision, at one moment giving us a hushed, confessional poem, at another a poem of public, political consciousness"--Carl Phillips.

Amaud Jamaul Johnson was born and raised in Compton, California, and educated at Howard University and Cornell University. He was a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford, and a Cave Canem Fellow. His collection, Red Summer, won the 2005 Dorset Prize from Tupelo Press and was published by Tupelo in spring 2006. Johnson is an assistant professor of English in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.