About
Kimberly Johnson is a poet, translator, and literary critic. Her collections of poetry include Leviathan with a Hook, A Metaphorical God, and the forthcoming Uncommon Prayer. Her monograph on the poetic developments of post-Reformation poetry will be published in 2014. In 2009, Penguin Classics published her translation of Virgil’s Georgics.
Her poetry, translations, and scholarly essays have appeared widely in publications including The New Yorker, Slate, The Iowa Review, Milton Quarterly, and Modern Philology.
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.
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Image by Ryan Johnson Photography
Watch + Listen
Hear a 2009 reading at UCLA’s Hammer Museum.
Hear a 2012 interview with The Missouri Review.
Watch video from 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
Virgil's Georgics: 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)