Halvard Johnson

Bio

Halvard Johnson was born in Newburgh, New York, and grew up in New York City and the Hudson Valley. Educated at Gorton High School in Yonkers, New York, and at Ohio Wesleyan University and the University of Chicago, he has received grants in poetry and fiction from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Maryland State Arts Council, and Baltimore City Arts. He has had several residency grants at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and a poetry fellowship at the Ragdale Foundation. His poetry and fiction have appeared in Puerto del Sol, Wisconsin Review, Hanging Loose, Mudfish, Poetry: New York, For Poetry, CrossConnect, Minnesota Review, Salt River Review, Blue Moon Review, Crania, Gulf Stream, Florida Review and Synaesthetic, among other periodicals and journals online and in print. His work has appeared in anthologies such as Open Poetry (edited by Ronald Gross and George Quasha: New York, Simon and Schuster, 1973), Finding America: The American Experience in Multicultural Literature (edited by Patricia Osborn: New York, Amsco School Publications, 1995), This Sporting Life: Poems about Sports and Games edited by Emilie Buchwald and Ruth Roston: Minneapolis, Milkweed Editions, 1987, reprinted 1998), Hummers, Knucklers, and Slow Curves: Contemporary Baseball Poems (edited by Don Johnson: Urbana and Chicago, University of Illinois Press; Mixed Voices: Contemporary Poems about Music (edited by Emilie Buchwald and Ruth Roston: Minneapolis, Milkweed Editions, 1991), and American Diaspora: Poetry of Displacement (edited by Virgil Suarez and Ryan G. Van Cleave: Iowa City, University of Iowa Press, 2001. He has lived and worked in Chicago, Illinois; El Paso, Texas; Cayey, Puerto Rico; Washington, D.C.; Baltimore, Maryland, and New York City. For many years he taught overseas in the European and Far Eastern divisions of the University of Maryland. Currently, he resides in New York City with his wife, the prize-winning fiction writer and painter Lynda Schor, with whom he often does joint readings. He teaches from time to time at the Eugene Lang College of the New School University and in Newark, New Jersey, at the New Jersey Institute of Technology.