About
Kimberly Johnson is the author of two collections of poetry, Leviathan with a Hook and A Metaphorical God, and of a translation of Virgil’s Georgics.
Her poetry, translations, and scholarly essays have appeared widely in publications including The New Yorker, Slate, The Iowa Review, and Modern Philology.
With Michael C. Schoenfeldt and Richard Strier, Johnson has edited a collection of essays on Renaissance literature, and she has served as the editor for a fully-searchable online collection of John Donne’s complete sermons.
Recipient of grants and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Utah Arts Council, and the Mellon Foundation, Johnson holds an M.A. from the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars, an M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and a Ph.D. in Renaissance Literature from the University of California at Berkeley.
Kimberly Johnson lives in Salt Lake City, Utah.
Watch + Listen
Hear Kimberly Johnson’s 2009 reading at UCLA’s Hammer Museum.
Watch Kimberly Johnson’s featured video for the Utah Arts Council’s Bite Size Poems project.
"Dazzling ... She writes with Milton open at her elbow but with the real dirt of a real Utah under her fingertips."
— The Yale Review
"It is a beautiful book, and an unusual one ... Its remarkable lucidity, its seductive energy, its lushness, and its music form a vision in which the real and the transcendental are indistinguishable."
— Mark Strand
A Poem of the Land
"Kimberly Johnson's superbly colourful, rhythmic and readable new translation...finds a way of feeding the Virgilian strain of English verse – from Milton to Wordsworth and beyond – back into her lines." — The Independent (UK)