Seattle author and National Book Award Winner Charles Johnson will visit Eagle Harbor Book Company at 7 p.m. Thursday, June 27 to discuss his latest collection of short stories, “Night Hawks.”
There is no charge to attend, admission is open to all.
Spanning genres from fantastical sci-fi to Raymond Carver-esque realism, the stories in “Night Hawks” convey messages of tolerance, hope, and gratitude with precise, elegant and moving language.
In “The Weave,” Ieesha and her boyfriend carry out a heist at the salon from which she has just been fired — coming away with thousands of dollars of merchandise in the form of hair extensions.
“Night Hawks,” the titular story, draws on Johnson’s friendship with the late playwright August Wilson to construct a narrative about two writers who meet at night to talk.
In “Kamadhatu,” a lonely Japanese abbot has his quiet world upended by a visit from a black American Buddhist whose presence pushes him toward the awakening he has long found elusive.
“Occupying Arthur Whitfield,” about a cab driver who decides to rob the home of a wealthy passenger, reminds readers to be grateful for what they have.
And “The Night Belongs to Phoenix Jones” combines the real-life story of a “superhero” in Seattle with an invented narrative about an aging English professor who decides to join him.
Throughout, Johnson creates memorable characters and real, human struggles that have the power to enlighten and change readers.
Johnson is the author of four novels — “Faith and the Good Thing” (1974), “Oxherding Tale” (1982), “Middle Passage” (1990) and “Dreamer” (1998) — three collections of short stories, including “Dr. King’s Refrigerator and Other Bedtime Stories,” two collections of comic art, among many other titles.
While working as a cartoonist and journalist in the early 1970s, he published more than 1,000 drawings in national publications, a selection of which appears in “Humor Me: An Anthology of Humor by Writers of Color” by John McNally.
In 1999, Indiana University Press published a collection of his essays on aesthetics, cultural criticism, articles, interviews, speeches, cartoons, out-takes from his novels and book reviews dating back to 1965, entitled, “I Call Myself an Artist: Writings By and About Charles Johnson”
A 1998 MacArthur fellow and 2002 recipient of an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature, Johnson received the 1990 National Book Award for “Middle Passage” (he was the first African-American male to win this prize since Ralph Ellison in 1953).
He has written more than 20 screenplays, among them “Booker,” which received the international Prix Jeunesse Award, a 1985 Writers Guild Award for “outstanding script in the television category of children’s shows,” and was released for home video in 1996 by Bonneville Worldwide Entertainment.
That show, along with “Charlie Smith and the Fritter Tree,” have been broadcast on the Disney channel. He was one of two writer-producers for “Up and Coming” and earlier created, hosted, and co-produced “Charlie’s Pad,” a PBS how-to-draw series that ran nationally for a decade in the U.S. and Canada; and he hosted the 1992 KCTS (Seattle) series “Words with Writers.”
