Updates, announcements, and launching a new project

Good morning! I’ll have some new writing to share next week, but today’s email is for all of the goings-ons swirling around my life right now.

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This Friday evening I’ll be reading alongside Courtney Faye Taylor at Wise Blood Bookstore in Westport, hosted by Bear Review. Courtney is a phenomenal, award-winning poet, and I feel lucky to read alongside her. Hope you can make it!

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My essay “Captain’s Log” appears in this month’s issue of The Sun Magazine. An earlier draft of this essay first appeared right here, in this weekly email. It’s exciting to see what can sometimes come of these weekly stories, essays, and poems.

Also beginning this month, I will be writing a regular column for KC Studio, a local print magazine covering arts and culture in the Kansas City region. My column will be brief, reflective essays with the theme “In Praise of . . .” I’m very excited to have this new platform for my writing. Here’s what editor Alice Thorson has to say about my new column in this month’s editor’s letter:

KC Studio contributing writer Calvin Wilson pronounced Andrew Johnson’s second book, The Thread, “enthralling” when he reviewed it on our November/December 2022 issue. “Johnson reclaims prose and poetry as means to connect with the experience of being human,” Wilson concluded. “And in these times dominated by misinformation, confusion and rage, that’s no small thing.”

With the launch of “In praise of,” KC Studio readers will be able to regularly peruse the personal essays that Johnson describes as “an affirmation of humanity in response to daily encounters and experiences.” Following his inaugural essay in praise of sweeping, the author will traverse topics ranging from owls to okra. Each essay will be accompanied by an original drawing by award-winning Kansas City artist Ruben Castillo."

KC Studio is a free bi-monthly magazine that can be found at newsstands around town. You can also subscribe to the magazine for free delivery to your house.

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Last but not least, I want to share a bit about my new art project. In 2022 I was awarded a Rocket Grant from the Charlotte Street Foundation and the Andy Warhol Foundation, which funds “unconventional, public-facing artwork in surprising places.” I’m grateful that the grant is making this new project possible.

The project is CLOSURE IS NOT JUSTICE, a multimedia exploration of the 1988 explosion that killed six KC firefighters, and the wrongful convictions that followed. I’m getting ready to launch the website and social media in just a few weeks, but that’s just the beginning. Over the next six months there will be a series of public and online encounters intended to engage the public’s memory of this tragedy, and to ask us all to consider the ways public memory is formed by government propaganda and media bias. The project will culminate in a multimedia art exhibition in September.

Stay tuned. I can’t wait to share more.