Description
Poetry. African American Studies. DARKTOWN FOLLIES, Amaud Jamaul Johnson's daring and surprising new collection of poems, responds to Black Vaudeville, specifically the personal and professional challenges African American variety performers faced in the early twentieth century. Johnson is fascinated by jokes that aren't funny—particularly, what it means when humor fails or reveals something unintended about our national character. DARKTOWN FOLLIES is an act of self-sabotage, a poet's willful attempt at recklessness, abandoning the "good sense" God gave him, as an effort to explore the boundaries and intersections of race and humor.
Author Bio
Amaud Jamaul Johnson was born and raised in Compton, California, and educated at Howard University and Cornell University. He is the author, most recently, of DARKTOWN FOLLIES: POEMS (Tupelo Press, 2013), and his collection, RED SUMMER, won the 2005 Dorset Prize from Tupelo Press. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University, his honors include fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Hurston/Wright Foundation, and Cave Canem. Johnson is an assistant professor of English in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Author City: MADISON, WI USA