WMRA's October Books & Brews: Jocelyn Nicole Johnson

WMRA's October 2022 Books & Brews features Jocelyn Nicole Johnson, whose fiction debut,  "My Monticello" was called "a masterly feat" by the New York Times and a winner of the Balcones Fiction Prize, Lillian Smith Book Award and the Weatherford Award.

7pm Tuesday, October 11, 2022 - Live, in person, at Pale Fire Brewing Company and available later on WMRA's Youtube Channel and on Facebook.

Signed copies of My Monticello  by Jocelyn Nicole Johnson will be available at the event and online at Stone Soup Books.

WMRA's Books & Brews is made possible thanks to our series sponsor, Gaines Group Architects. The Gaines Group has offices in Charlottesville and Harrisonburg.

About My Monticello

 A young woman descended from Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings driven from her neighborhood by a white militia. A  university professor studying racism by conducting a secret social  experiment on his own son. A single mother desperate to buy her first  home even as the world hurtles toward catastrophe. Each fighting to survive in America.

Tough-minded, vulnerable, and brave, Jocelyn Nicole Johnson’s precisely  imagined debut explores burdened inheritances and extraordinary pursuits  of belonging. Set in the near future, the eponymous novella, “My  Monticello,” tells of a diverse group of Charlottesville neighbors  fleeing violent white supremacists. Led by Da’Naisha, a young Black  descendant of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, they seek refuge in  Jefferson’s historic plantation home in a desperate attempt to outlive  the long-foretold racial and environmental unravelling within the  nation. In “Control Negro,” hailed by Roxane Gay as “one hell  of story,” a university professor devotes himself to the study of racism  and the development of ACMs (average American Caucasian males) by  clinically observing his own son from birth in order to “painstakingly  mark the route of this Black child too, one whom I could prove was so  strikingly decent and true that America could not find fault in him  unless we as a nation had projected it there.” Johnson’s characters all  seek out home as a place and an internal state, whether in the form of a  Nigerian widower who immigrates to a meager existence in the city of  Alexandria, finding himself adrift; a young mixed-race woman who adopts a  new tongue and name to escape the landscapes of rural Virginia and her  family; or a single mother who seeks salvation through “Buying a House  Ahead of the Apocalypse.” United by these characters’ relentless struggles against reality and fate, My Monticello is a formidable book that bears witness to this country’s legacies and  announces the arrival of a wildly original new voice in American  fiction.

About Jonathan M. Katz

Jocelyn Nicole Johnson is the author of My Monticello, a fiction debut that was called "a masterly feat"  by the New York Times and a winner of the Balcones Fiction Prize,  Lillian Smith Book Award and the Weatherford Award. Johnson's work was  also a finalist for the Kirkus Fiction Prize, the  National Book Critics Circle Leonard Award, the LA Times Debut  Seidenbaum Prize, as well as long-listed for a Pen/Faulkner Fiction  Award and the Story Prize. Johnson has been a fellow at TinHouse,  Hedgebrook, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.  Her writing has appeared in Guernica, The Guardian, Kweli Journal and elsewhere. Her short story “Control Negro” was anthologized in The Best American Short Stories, guest edited by Roxane Gay and  read live by LeVar Burton. A veteran public school art teacher, Johnson  lives and writes in Charlottesville, Virginia.