Judith Johnson’s short story, “The Tarot of Lost Names,” has won the Katherine Anne Porter Prize for Fiction from Nimrod International Journal. The prize includes publication of the prize winning story in the journal. The October presentation of the prize will take place at the University of Tulsa, in Tulsa, Okahoma, accompanied by a performance of the story. In November Johnson will be performing her work in Saltzberg, Austria, as part of the 1st Global Conference on Immersive Worlds and Transmedia Narratives.
Johnson is the author of eight books of poetry, the first of which, Uranium Poems, won the 1968 Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize, and the most recent of which, Cities of Mathematics and Desire, was published by Sheep Meadow Press in 2005. Her short fiction collection, The Life of Riot, was published by Atheneum. The Katherine Anne Porter Prize for Fiction is the most recent recognition her short fiction has won; earlier awards include a Playboy Fiction Prize. Her earlier poetry and fiction have been published in Playboy, MS., the New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, The Nation, American Poetry Review, and Nimrod International Journal Johnson served as President of the Poetry Society of America, the national membership organization for poets, and as President of the Board of Associated Writing Programs, the membership organization for teachers of creative writing. She is now editor and publisher of 13th Moon Press, which publishes 13th Moon: A Feminist Literary Magazine, the oldest feminist literary journal in the USA, The Little Magazine: a Journal of Digital Literature, and both print and digital books of interest to feminists, writers of digital media fiction and poetry, and writers of experimental fiction and poetry.
She taught English and Women’s Studies for 27 years at the University at Albany, State University of New York, where she also, at various times, chaired each of her academic departments, and served as Associate Dean of Undergraduate Studies and Director of Honors Programs. After her retirement from full-time teaching, she relocated to Bloomfield, New Jersey, where she continues to write, and to edit 13th Moon Press.
