October 14, 2014

Coming to Illuminations, June 2015

The literary journal, Illuminations, will publish a long interview of J. Chester Johnson by Ann Cefola in its upcoming June, 2015 edition. Over the years, the pages of Illuminations have included the works of such luminaries as Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney, Stephen Spender, Nadine Gordimer, James Merrill, Carol Ann Duffy, Allen Tate – just to name a few. Ann Cefola, an accomplished poet and translator, is author of the poetry volumes, Face Painting in the Dark, St. Agnes, Pink-Slipped and Sugaring, and has translated Helene Sanguinetti’s Hence This Cradle; among other notable achievements, she was awarded the Robert Penn Warren Award, judged by John Ashbery. The interview to appear in Illuminations is wide-ranging and covers Johnson’s own poetry but also focuses significantly on his participation, along with W. H. Auden, as the two poets on the drafting committee for the retranslation of the psalms, currently included in the Book of Common Prayer of the Episcopal Church (USA), which version has also been adopted by Lutherans in the United States and Canada and by the Anglican Church of Canada.