Cyree Jarelle Johnson – författare

This book explores the stories behind leaving the mountains and islands of Greece throughout its recent tumultuous history. Many of those emigrants came to the sprawling cities and countryside of the United States. Readers will explore how Greek Americans did much to overcome war, family conflicts, exploitative labor practices, restrictive xenophobic quotas, and generational identity differences to become part of the American experiment. The history of how Greeks became Americans through these contemplations of the problems that immigration poses will activate the reader''s critical thinking skills. They will recognize that these problems are relevant today.

2020 LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD WINNER2020 FINALIST for the FIRECRACKER AWARDSSLINGSHOT questions the value of manhood, the price of sex, and the possibility of liberation.SLINGSHOT begins with the author ensconced in the menacing isolation of the pastoral, but once the work migrates to the City, monstrum grows form and fangs. In these messy, horny, desperate poems spun from dream logic, Cyrée Jarelle Johnson considers the consequences of black sexual and gender deviance, as well as the emotional burden of being forced to the rim of society, then punished for what keeps you alive.

WINNER OF THE JAMES LAUGHLIN AWARDWINNER OF THE KENNY FRIES DISABLED WRITER LITERARY AWARDIn WATCHNIGHT, we accompany Johnson’s unnamed protagonist on a psychedelic quest across myriad forms, places, and times marked by climate crisis, exodus, and Black trans identity-making.In exhilarating lyric poems and chiseled prose blocks, Cyrée Jarelle Johnson charts the history of his family alongside the history of Watchnight—a churchy holiday of messianic tarrying—and steps through portals to render the human faces of American internal migration and mass displacement—from countryside to city and back again. Spanning from 1803 to a near-future rife with class tension and racial anxiety, WATCHNIGHT is a study of Black bonds, Black grief, and Black flight.