About
Kimberly Johnson is a poet, translator, and literary critic. Her collections of poetry include Leviathan with a Hook, A Metaphorical God, and Uncommon Prayer. Her monograph on the poetic developments of post-Reformation poetry appeared in 2014. Her translation of Virgil’s Georgics was published by Penguin Classics in 2009, and her translation of Hesiod’s poems was published by Northwestern University Press in 2017.
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 conversation on translation, along with Paisley Rekdal, at Superstition Review.
Hear an interview with Missouri Review.
Hear a 2014 reading at Prairie Lights in Iowa City.
Watch a video from the Utah Arts Council’s Bite Size Poems project.
Watch Jonathon Shuff’s musical setting of “Easter, Looking Westward.”
Watch a reading at Salt Lake’s City Art Series.
Watch an interview about lyric poetry on KBYU’s Thinking Aloud.
Hesiod's Theogony and Works and Days: A Bilingual Edition
"In translating Hesiod, a scholar has to evoke both the rustic, conversational tone of Works and Days, as well as the magisterial epic voice of the Theogony, with all of its glittering details. Johnson, already a poet who could write about paint drying on a wall and make tears come to your eyes, makes Hesiod's two very different works come alive in very different ways. This is a beautiful book, and a terrific introduction to Archaic Greek literature." — Douglas Metzger, Literature and History Podcast
Uncommon Prayer
"With the fine artistry, precision, erudition, wit, and lexical magic we have come to expect from Johnson." — Michael Sowder, 15 Bytes
Made Flesh: Sacrament and Poetics in Post-Reformation England
"Kimberly Johnson's dual identity as scholar and poet animates this strikingly original book—not only in its limpid, lively prose, but also in its resonant reappraisal of a seemingly familiar subject. Early modern devotional poetry has often been analyzed in terms of its theological and ecclesiological contexts; the real strength and purchase of Johnson's book lies in its integration of this contextual material with a searching investigation of the formal strategies of poetry as such."— Molly Murray, Columbia University
Before the Door of God: An Anthology of Devotional Poetry
"The painstaking work of two poet-scholars, Jay Hopler and Kimberly Johnson, the collection promises to be a crucial source text for scholars, a course text for students and a manual for seekers who wish to find prayers that fit their condition and cast of mind." — Cleveland Plain Dealer
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)