On October 15th, 2018, J. Chester Johnson was one of two featured poets (the other, Elizabeth Powell) at the iconic venue, The Troubadour, in London, England. Primarily known as a famed place for musicians, The Troubadour has over the last two decades become well-known as a special place in London for poetry. J. Chester Johnson had the opportunity to read his verse, principally from his latest book of poetry, NOW AND THEN: SELECTED LONGER POEMS, which was published in 2017.

J. Chester Johnson was the featured speaker for “The Feast of the Dedication of Grosvenor Chapel” the afternoon of October 14th, 2018; this Chapel was the church where Dwight David Eisenhower, Commander of the Allied Forces at the time, and his staff routinely worshiped while stationed in England during World War II. This was one of several presentations given at a variety of venues in London and Oxford for Johnson’s latest book (published in 2017), AUDEN, THE PSALMS, AND ME, the story of the retranslation of the psalms as contained in the American Book of Common Prayer, for which the eminent poet, W. H. Auden, and Johnson were the two poets on the drafting committee for the retranslation.

J. Chester Johnson returned to the site of the 1919 Elaine Race Massacre, one of the deadliest assaults on African-Americans in our country’s history. Mr. Johnson has written articles and other pieces on the event and has presented on the subject in various venues, but this time, he discussed the event and its ramifications in Phillips County, Arkansas, where the Massacre actually occurred. J. Chester Johnson, whose maternal grandfather participated, was joined in the presentation by Sheila Walker, whose family members, including her great-grandmother and great uncles, were among the victims. Since Sheila and Chester had antecedents representing the two sides of the conflagration, they have, over the last several years, committed to a reconciliation of the inter-racial and generational trauma that has been associated with the event. Much in the presentations recited the stories and history in each of their respective families related to the Massacre, but the journey of reconciliation between Sheila and Chester was also given special relevance. A reception was held immediately following the presentation at Beth El Heritage Hall, located at the corner of Perry and Pecan, Helena, Arkansas.

Video Courtesy of Delta Cultural Center.

J. Chester Johnson signs his ‘In The Rows’, a poem displayed as part of the celebration for Rev. Canon James G. Callaway, who served for over 34 years on the clergy staff of Trinity Church, located at Wall Street and Broadway in lower Manhattan in New York City.

– Photo by Elizabeth Powell

On November 3rd, 2016 at the memorial service for the poet Deborah Danner, the African-American woman who was shot and killed in her apartment by New York City police on Tuesday, October 18th, J. Chester Johnson recited pieces of Ms. Danner’s verse.

J. Chester Johnson reads his poem, “St. Paul’s Chapel,” at the Calling of the Names ceremony 15 years after 9/11. Photo Credit: Nina Roberts

On Thursday, April 14 at 6:00PM, J. Chester Johnson read his poetry at the main bookstore of New York University, located at 8th Street and Broadway in Manhattan, as part of a program entitled “FOUR WAY BOOKS AND FRIENDS.” As a “friend,” J. Chester Johnson read alongside several poets at the event who are published by FOUR WAY BOOKS. Among other pieces, Johnson read excerpts from his  book of poems, NOW AND THEN: SELECTED LONGER POEMS, published by St. Johann Press.

J. Chester Johnson and his wife, Freda, stand beside several of his quotes, associated with the installation of a pew from St. Paul’s Chapel into the 9/11 Tribute Center – both the pew and the quotes have been made part of the Tribute Center at Ground Zero in lower Manhattan in New York City.

Johnson’s drama in verse, “For Conduct And Innocents,” about the martyr and 20th century theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, was presented as a multi-media event (drama, music, dance, film) on Oct. 18, 2015 at Trinity Wall Street with nearly 50 performers participating.

Courtesy of Trinity Wall Street, New York

J. Chester Johnson at the main entrance to Lambeth Palace, London, England, where Thomas Cranmer is said to have compiled the first BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER in 1549. J. Chester Johnson was one of two poets (the other being W. H. Auden) on the drafting committee for the retranslation of the Psalms, contained in the current version of the BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER, issued by the Episcopal Church (USA).

The Senior Committee of the Harvard Business School Club of New York held an event: “Poetry: Uniting Commerce and Verse to Enhance Life and Work”, a discussion with a distinguished panel of business people who have included poetry in their lives, discussing how poetry forms the foundation for their success and how it has enhanced their lives and business careers. It took place on March 4, 2015 at Poets House. Speakers included: Lee Briccetti, Kate Cheney Chappell, J. Chester Johnson and Bruce McEver.
Click here for written remarks by J. Chester Johnson.
Or you can listen to an audio recording of the entire event below.

Honoring Martin Luther King Jr. with a sermon at Trinity Wall Street, January 18th, 2015 by J. Chester Johnson (Video courtesy of Trinity Wall Street)

Chester Johnson gave the Martin Luther King Jr. Birthday sermon at Trinity Wall Street on Sunday, January 18, 2015 at 11:15AM. Previous speakers for this occasion at Trinity Wall Street have included Andrew Young, Jesse Jackson, the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, Marion Wright Edelman (founder and president of the Children’s Defense Fund), Calvin Butts (senior minister at the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem), among many others, who have contributed meaningfully to the American civil rights movement. Trinity Wall Street, founded over three hundred years ago, is the iconic church with the large cemetery surrounding it (where Alexander Hamilton, Robert Fulton, Albert Gallatin, among others, are buried), located at the top of Wall Street on Broadway in lower Manhattan (New York City). 

In the late 1960s, after the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. and near the height of the civil rights movement, J. Chester Johnson left New York City, returning to Monticello, Arkansas in the Mississippi River Delta, where he had grown up before leaving for college, to teach in an all African-American public school in advance of integration of the education system in southeast Arkansas. In 2008, he wrote the litany of offense and apology in prose and poetry for the national Day of Repentance, when the Episcopal Church formally apologized, with the presiding bishop officiating, for its role in transatlantic slavery and related evils. He has also written on the American Civil Rights Movement, several pieces of which are contained in the J. Chester Johnson Collection of the Civil Rights Archives at Queens College (New York City), the school Andrew Goodman attended before joining Freedom Summer when he was martyred, along with James Chaney and Michael Schwerner, in Philadelphia, Mississippi.

Click here to download a transcript of the sermon.

The literary journal, Illuminations, published 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, the Anglican Church of Canada, and the Scottish Episcopal Church.

A packed-house symposium on the Elaine Race Massacre, which occurred in the fall of 1919 on the Arkansas side of the Mississippi River Delta and in which more than hundred (and possibly hundreds of) African-Americans were killed, was held at St. Paul’s Chapel in New York City on September 20, 2014.

Subsequently, an article entitled, “After Sins of the Fathers, Steps Toward Reconciliation,” was written by Lynn Goswick, associate editor of Trinity Wall Street, and published in THE EPISCOPAL NEW YORKER, fall 2014; the article describes, among other matters, the reconciliation journey that J. Chester Johnson, whose grandfather, Lonnie, joined in the Massacre, and Sheila Walker, whose great-uncles were victims, have taken together to dispel any remnants of adverse human and spiritual consequences from the racial conflagration.

The article appears on page 21 of THE EPISCOPAL NEW YORKER.

John Fuller and J. Chester Johnson at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, England. John Fuller, English poet and author, is also Fellow Emeritus at Magdalen College, Oxford University.

Anne-Marie Fyfe and J. Chester Johnson outside the Troubadour in London. Born in Cushendall in the Glens of Antrim and now living in West London, the poet Anne-Marie Fyfe is the former chair of the Poetry Society (2006-2009); she founded and has run for seventeen years Coffee-House Poetry at the Troubadour.

“In The Rows”:, A Poetic Tribute written by J. Chester Johnson to a friend, as it appears in the program employed for the ceremonial celebration of the friend’s thirty-four years of service as an Episcopal priest at Trinity Wall Street, the venerable, iconic church located in lower Manhattan in New York City.

(Click here to read full poem.)

A MASSACRE IN ARKANSAS – Facing Love and History with J. Chester Johnson, February 16, 2014, symposium at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, Metuchen, New Jersey whose rector at the time was Rev. Barbara C. Crafton.

J. Chester Johnson and Freda with the poet Cornelius Eady and his wife, the novelist Sarah Micklem, at a Cave Canem event.

Edward Mendelson, literary executor and principal biographer for W. H. Auden and Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, who wrote the introduction for St. Paul’s Chapel & Selected Shorter Poems, speaks about the book at its launch held in St. Paul’s Chapel, New York City.

J. Chester Johnson was the featured poet appearing at the Kairos Poetry Café, St. John’s Lutheran Church in the West Village, on Sunday, November 17th, 2013. Johnson read a number of his shorter poems – some older pieces, some new. He introduced each poem with a short comment on the event or salient motif that inspired the creation of the verse.

Courtesy of Kairos Poetry Café

At David Lehman’s book launch party on November 6, 2013 for his New and Selected Poems, this picture includes, among others, the poets: Vijay Seshadri, Tina Chang, Larry Joseph, David Lehman, and J. Chester Johnson. Photo © Star Black.

Miller Williams, well-known poet who read at President Bill Clinton’s second inaugural, and J. Chester Johnson at their joint reading held in October, 2010 (Fayetteville, Arkansas).

Poets and Readers for the St. Paul’s Chapel Poetry Festival, January 27, 2013, Organized by J. Chester Johnson; photo by Karlene Gordon.

J. Chester Johnson and Freda Johnson in Paris with the writer and activist, Frank Romano.

Courtesy of Pryor Center for Arkansas Oral and Visual History

Original poems from his latest book of verse, St. Paul’s Chapel & Selected Shorter Poems.

Remembrance and Reconciliation Through Poetry

Based on release by Poets House