Contact Information

Office: 4144 JFSB

Phone: 422-2998

E-mail: kimberly_johnson@byu.edu

Courses Taught:
Creative writing workshops and theory (Engl 218, 319, 419, 519, 617)
Renaissance literature (English 372, 382, 383, 385, 495, 620, 655)
Classics and the English literary tradition (Honors 303)

Kimberly Johnson teaches courses in creative writing and in Renaissance literature. In both fields, her primary interest lies in lyric poetry. In critical work on the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century lyric, she has explored issues of form, aesthetics, religion, and gender, and the intersection of these concerns in the literature's cultural context.

Her own poetry negotiates many of these same ideas as it confronts the limits of representation. She tries to impress upon her students the urgency of being accurate and specific, both as writers and as critics.

She has published two books of poetry, Leviathan with a Hook (Persea Books, 2002) and A Metaphorical God (Persea Books, 2008), and a translation of Virgil's Georgics: A Poem of the Land (Penguin Classics, forthcoming). She is also the editor of John Donne's Complete Sermons: The Electronic Archive (lib.byu.edu/dlib/donne) and (with Michael C. Schoenfeldt and Richard Strier) Divisions on a Ground: Essays in Renaissance Literature in Honor of Donald M. Friedman (2008). Her poetry, translations, and critical essays have appeared in numerous publications, including The New Yorker, Slate, Yale Review, and Modern Philology.

Dr. Johnson's current projects include a scholarly book on eucharistic eroticism in seventeenth-century devotional poetry, a verse translation of Hesiod's Works and Days, and a third collection of poetry, tentatively entitled Siege Psalter.

Her awards include prizes from the Merton Foundation and the Utah Arts Council, and a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Degrees

MA, Johns Hopkins U, 1995; MFA, U. of Iowa, 1997; PhD, U of California Berkeley, 2003