Guy Johnson
AALBC Mourns the Passing of Guy Johnson
Guy Johnson is a Top 100 AALBC.com Bestselling Author Making Our List 22 Times
Biography of Guy Johnson
“It is my desire to be a great writer. I know that I still have a mountain to climb to achieve that. With this first novel, I am just above the foothills, but I see the path to the top, and it is my desire to write compelling stories about everything that I find of interest. I hope to be with you as a writer for a very long time, and I hope that you will enjoy reading my work, because readers are the highest form of life on this planet.”
“Truthfully, while I have been writing since I was 18, I didn’t know that I wanted to be a writer. I thought I was going to be a painter and sketcher. Then I thought I was going to be a photographer. I tried a hand at darkroom technician. I played in a band. It took me quite some time to discover that I wanted to write. The great thing about being the son of Maya Angelou is that I had the good fortune to grow up around some of the greatest black artists, dancers, singers, musicians, and actors of our time. My mother was in “The Blacks” in 1960, and in that cast were Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, James Earl Jones, Godfrey Cambridge, Roscoe Lee Brown, Lou Gossett Jr., and there were so many more I can’t even remember. In terms of musicians, Billie Holiday, Clifford Brown, Eric Dolphy, et cetera. And on the political side she headed Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, so of course I met Martin Luther King. Muhammad Ali met Malcolm X for the time at my mother’s house. So I would say I had the great fortune of living with one of the most inspiring creative people, and she was my mother.”
The above is from an on-line chat that Guy Johnson (1945 – 2022) participated in on December 10, 1998 archived by BarnesandNoble.com.
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