Join us SSB & County Highway welcoming author Lee Clay Johnson to DC!
He will be in conversation with legendary literary editor Gary Fisketjon, celebrating the new book, Bloodline, by Johnson
Lee Clay Johnson was born and raised around Nashville, Tennessee, in a family of bluegrass musicians. He was kicked out of high school on the first day of class, and soon thereafter began touring the country as a bass player in various bands. He attended Tennessee State University, then transferred up north to Bennington College, where he studied with free jazz pioneer Milford Graves and became the first person in his family to earn a college degree. He received an MFA from the University of Virginia, under the guidance of Deborah Eisenberg and others, and went on to publish his first novel, Nitro Mountain (Knopf ’16) which won the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts & Letters. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in County Highway, TheSouthampton Review, Ploughshares, Lit Hub, Oxford American, The Common, Appalachian Heritage, Salamander, Mississippi Review, and more. He served as a fellow at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Right now, he lives in Providence, Rhode Island, with his wife, the writer Sasha Wiseman, and teaches at St. Joseph’s University, New York, where he directs the Brooklyn Writers Foundry Low-Residency MFA program. Bloodline is his second novel.
Gary Fisketjon is the literary editor for County Highway and its publishing imprint Panamerica Books. Previously, he worked at Random House, Vintage Books, and the Atlantic Monthly Press until 1990 when he joined Alfred A. Knopf, where he became Vice President and Editor at Large until 2019. He was the creator of the Vintage Contemporaries line of books at Random House. He’s edited a long list of literary greats including Cormac McCarthy, Haruki Murakami, Denis Johnson, Raymond Carver, and dozens more.