Michael K. Johnson – författare

During the past twenty years, multitudes of exciting discoveries in the field of anaerobic bacteria have been made.  Biochemistry and Physiology of Anaerobic Bacteria explores the full range of these microorganisms. Many anaerobes have been found to have the uniquely fascinating quality of being able to survive, indeed even thrive, in extreme environments. Anaerobic bacteria often do not require oxygen, can survive extremes in temperature, and can withstand the presence of toxins and heavy metals. In addition, these organisms have very different metabolic processes than "conventional" microorganisms. The wide diversity of metabolism in anaerobes is only part of the story. They have distinct energies, cytochromes, electron transport proteins, hydrogenases and dehydrogenases. Their molecular biology, physiology, and ability to use many types of electron receptors (CO2, sulfur, nitrogen and metal oxides) are also extraordinary. With practical applications ranging from wastewater treatment to food storage issues, clinical diagnosis and treatment of a wide range of medical conditions to decontamination of heavy metal exposures Biochemistry and Physiology of Anaerobic Bacteria will prove indispensable to researchers and students alike.

Summarizes the essential biosynthetic pathways for assembly of metal cofactor sites in functional metalloproteinsMetalloprotein Active Site Assembly focuses on the processes that have evolved to orchestrate the assembly of metal cofactor sites in functional metalloproteins. It goes beyond the simple incorporation of single metal ions in a protein framework, and includes metal cluster assembly, metal-cofactor biosynthesis and insertion, and metal-based post-translational modifications of the protein environments that are necessary for function. Several examples of each of these areas have now been identified and studied; the current volume provides the current state-of-the-art understanding of the processes involved.An excellent companion to the earlier book in this series Metals in Cells—which discussed both the positive and negative effects of cellular interactions with metals—this comprehensive book provides a diverse sampling of what is known about metalloprotein active site assembly processes. It covers all major biological transition metal components (Mn, Fe, Co, Ni, Mo), as well as the other inorganic components, metal-binding organic cofactors (e.g., heme, siroheme, cobalamin, molybdopterin), and post-translationally modified metal binding sites that make up the patchwork of evolved biological catalytic sites. The book compares and contrasts the biosynthetic assembly of active sites involving all biological metals. This has never been done before since it is a relatively new, fast-developing area of research.Metalloprotein Active Site Assembly is an ideal text for practitioners of inorganic biochemistry who are studying the biosynthetic pathways and gene clusters involved in active site assembly, and for inorganic chemists who want to apply the concepts learned to potential synthetic pathways to active site mimics.

During the past twenty years, multitudes of exciting discoveries in the field of anaerobic bacteria have been made.  Biochemistry and Physiology of Anaerobic Bacteria explores the full range of these microorganisms. Many anaerobes have been found to have the uniquely fascinating quality of being able to survive, indeed even thrive, in extreme environments. Anaerobic bacteria often do not require oxygen, can survive extremes in temperature, and can withstand the presence of toxins and heavy metals. In addition, these organisms have very different metabolic processes than "conventional" microorganisms. The wide diversity of metabolism in anaerobes is only part of the story. They have distinct energies, cytochromes, electron transport proteins, hydrogenases and dehydrogenases. Their molecular biology, physiology, and ability to use many types of electron receptors (CO2, sulfur, nitrogen and metal oxides) are also extraordinary. With practical applications ranging from wastewater treatment to food storage issues, clinical diagnosis and treatment of a wide range of medical conditions to decontamination of heavy metal exposures Biochemistry and Physiology of Anaerobic Bacteria will prove indispensable to researchers and students alike.

2021 Top Ten Finalist for the Locus Awards in Nonfiction Joshua Smith’s chapter “Uncle Tom’s Cabin Showdown” won the 2021 Don D. Walker Prize from the Western Literature AssociationWeird Westerns is an exploration of the hybrid western genre-an increasingly popular and visible form that mixes western themes, iconography, settings, and conventions with elements drawn from other genres, such as science fiction, horror, and fantasy. Despite frequent declarations of the western’s death, the genre is now defined in part by its zombie-like ability to survive in American popular culture in weird, reanimated, and reassembled forms.The essays in Weird Westerns analyze a wide range of texts, including those by Native American authors Stephen Graham Jones (Blackfeet) and William Sanders (Cherokee); the cult television series Firefly and The Walking Dead; the mainstream feature films Suicide Squad and Django Unchained; the avant-garde and bizarre fiction of Joe R. Lansdale; the tabletop roleplaying game Deadlands: The Weird West; and the comic book series Wynonna Earp.The essays explore how these weird westerns challenge conventional representations by destabilizing or subverting the centrality of the heterosexual, white, male hero but also often surprisingly reinforce existing paradigms in their inability to imagine an existence outside of colonial frameworks.

2021 Top Ten Finalist for the Locus Awards in Nonfiction Joshua Smith’s chapter “Uncle Tom’s Cabin Showdown” won the 2021 Don D. Walker Prize from the Western Literature AssociationWeird Westerns is an exploration of the hybrid western genre-an increasingly popular and visible form that mixes western themes, iconography, settings, and conventions with elements drawn from other genres, such as science fiction, horror, and fantasy. Despite frequent declarations of the western’s death, the genre is now defined in part by its zombie-like ability to survive in American popular culture in weird, reanimated, and reassembled forms.The essays in Weird Westerns analyze a wide range of texts, including those by Native American authors Stephen Graham Jones (Blackfeet) and William Sanders (Cherokee); the cult television series Firefly and The Walking Dead; the mainstream feature films Suicide Squad and Django Unchained; the avant-garde and bizarre fiction of Joe R. Lansdale; the tabletop roleplaying game Deadlands: The Weird West; and the comic book series Wynonna Earp.The essays explore how these weird westerns challenge conventional representations by destabilizing or subverting the centrality of the heterosexual, white, male hero but also often surprisingly reinforce existing paradigms in their inability to imagine an existence outside of colonial frameworks.

Winner of the 2024 Thomas J. Lyon Book Award Looking across the cultural landscape of the twenty-first century, its literature, film, television, comic books, and other media, we can see multiple examples of what Shelley S. Rees calls a “changeling western,” what others have called “weird westerns,” and what Michael K. Johnson refers to as “speculative westerns”-that is, hybrid western forms created by merging the western with one or more speculative genres or subgenres, including science fiction, fantasy, horror, and alternate history.Speculative Wests investigates both speculative westerns and other speculative texts that feature western settings. Just as “western” refers both to a genre and a region, Johnson’s narrative involves a study of both genre and place, a study of the “speculative Wests” that have begun to emerge in contemporary texts such as the zombie-threatened California of Justina Ireland’s Deathless Divide (2020), the reimagined future Navajo nation of Rebecca Roanhorse’s Sixth World series (2018–19), and the complex temporal and geographic borderlands of Alfredo VÉa’s time travel novel The Mexican Flyboy (2016). Focusing on literature, film, and television from 2016 to 2020, Speculative Wests creates new visions of the American West.

Winner of the 2024 Thomas J. Lyon Book Award Looking across the cultural landscape of the twenty-first century, its literature, film, television, comic books, and other media, we can see multiple examples of what Shelley S. Rees calls a “changeling western,” what others have called “weird westerns,” and what Michael K. Johnson refers to as “speculative westerns”-that is, hybrid western forms created by merging the western with one or more speculative genres or subgenres, including science fiction, fantasy, horror, and alternate history.Speculative Wests investigates both speculative westerns and other speculative texts that feature western settings. Just as “western” refers both to a genre and a region, Johnson’s narrative involves a study of both genre and place, a study of the “speculative Wests” that have begun to emerge in contemporary texts such as the zombie-threatened California of Justina Ireland’s Deathless Divide (2020), the reimagined future Navajo nation of Rebecca Roanhorse’s Sixth World series (2018–19), and the complex temporal and geographic borderlands of Alfredo VÉa’s time travel novel The Mexican Flyboy (2016). Focusing on literature, film, and television from 2016 to 2020, Speculative Wests creates new visions of the American West.

Hell-Bent for Leather: Sex and Sexuality in the Weird Western builds on the Locus Award finalist Weird Westerns: Race, Gender, Genre. This new collection takes a deep dive into the myriad ways sex and sexuality are imagined in weird western literature, film, television, and video games, paying special attention to portrayals of power and privilege. The contributors explore weird western challenges to assumptions about varied genders and sexualities, drawing our attention to how the western can reinforce existing gender and sexual paradigms or overturn them in delightful, terrifying, or unexpected ways.Primary texts range from CBS’s campy BDSM-inflected steampunk western The Wild Wild West to the Star Wars franchise’s popular leather-daddy bounty hunter The Mandalorian, from Ishmael Reed’s satirical postmodern western Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down to C Pam Zhang’s acclaimed novel How Much of These Hills Is Gold. Chapters engage texts from Australia and Great Britain, classic horror like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, the popular video games BioShock Infinite and The Last of Us II, and less well-known texts like Laguna Pueblo–Navajo author A. A. Carr’s erotic vampire/monster slayer western Eye Killers.

Hell-Bent for Leather: Sex and Sexuality in the Weird Western builds on the Locus Award finalist Weird Westerns: Race, Gender, Genre. This new collection takes a deep dive into the myriad ways sex and sexuality are imagined in weird western literature, film, television, and video games, paying special attention to portrayals of power and privilege. The contributors explore weird western challenges to assumptions about varied genders and sexualities, drawing our attention to how the western can reinforce existing gender and sexual paradigms or overturn them in delightful, terrifying, or unexpected ways.Primary texts range from CBS’s campy BDSM-inflected steampunk western The Wild Wild West to the Star Wars franchise’s popular leather-daddy bounty hunter The Mandalorian, from Ishmael Reed’s satirical postmodern western Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down to C Pam Zhang’s acclaimed novel How Much of These Hills Is Gold. Chapters engage texts from Australia and Great Britain, classic horror like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, the popular video games BioShock Infinite and The Last of Us II, and less well-known texts like Laguna Pueblo–Navajo author A. A. Carr’s erotic vampire/monster slayer western Eye Killers.

Hoo-Doo Cowboys and Bronze Buckaroos undertakes an interdisciplinary exploration of the African American West through close readings of texts from a variety of media. This approach allows for both an in-depth analysis of individual texts and a discussion of material often left out or underrepresented in studies focused only on traditional literary material. The book engages heretofore unexamined writing by Rose Gordon, who wrote for local Montana newspapers rather than for a national audience; memoirs and letters of musicians, performers, and singers (such as W. C. Handy and Taylor Gordon), who lived in or wrote about touring the American West; the novels and films of Oscar Micheaux; black-cast westerns starring Herb Jeffries; largely unappreciated and unexamined episodes from the ""golden age of western television"" that feature African American actors; film and television westerns that use science fiction settings to imagine a ""postracial"" or ""postsoul"" frontier; Percival Everett's fiction addressing contemporary black western experience; and movies as recent as Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained.Despite recent interest in the history of the African American West, we know very little about how the African American past in the West has been depicted in a full range of imaginative forms. Hoo-Doo Cowboys and Bronze Buckaroos advances our discovery of how the African American West has been experienced, imagined, portrayed, and performed.

Born in 1893 into the only African American family in White Sulphur Springs, Montana, Emmanuel Taylor Gordon (1893–1971) became an internationally famous singer in the 1920s at the height of the Harlem Renaissance. With his musical partner, J. Rosamond Johnson, Gordon was a crucially important figure in popularizing African American spirituals as an art form, giving many listeners their first experience of black spirituals.Despite his fame, Taylor Gordon has been all but forgotten, until now. Michael K. Johnson illuminates Gordon's personal history and his cultural importance to the legacy of the Harlem Renaissance, arguing that during the height of his celebrity, Gordon was one of the most significant African American male vocalists of his era. Gordon's story—working in the White Sulphur Springs brothels as an errand boy, traveling the country in John Ringling's private railway car, performing on vaudeville stages from New York to Vancouver to Los Angeles, performing for royalty in England, becoming a celebrated author with a best-selling 1929 autobiography, and his long bout of mental illness—adds depth to the history of the Harlem Renaissance and makes him one of the most fascinating figures of the twentieth century. Through detailed documentation of Gordon's career—newspaper articles, reviews, letters, and other archival material—the author demonstrates the scope of Gordon's cultural impact. The result is a detailed account of Taylor's musical education, his career as a vaudeville performer, the remarkable performance history of Johnson and Gordon, his status as an in-demand celebrity singer and author, his time as a radio star, and, finally, his descent into madness. Can't Stand Still brings Taylor Gordon back to the center of the stage.

Born in 1893 into the only African American family in White Sulphur Springs, Montana, Emmanuel Taylor Gordon (1893–1971) became an internationally famous singer in the 1920s at the height of the Harlem Renaissance. With his musical partner, J. Rosamond Johnson, Gordon was a crucially important figure in popularizing African American spirituals as an art form, giving many listeners their first experience of black spirituals.Despite his fame, Taylor Gordon has been all but forgotten, until now. Michael K. Johnson illuminates Gordon's personal history and his cultural importance to the legacy of the Harlem Renaissance, arguing that during the height of his celebrity, Gordon was one of the most significant African American male vocalists of his era. Gordon's story—working in the White Sulphur Springs brothels as an errand boy, traveling the country in John Ringling's private railway car, performing on vaudeville stages from New York to Vancouver to Los Angeles, performing for royalty in England, becoming a celebrated author with a best-selling 1929 autobiography, and his long bout of mental illness—adds depth to the history of the Harlem Renaissance and makes him one of the most fascinating figures of the twentieth century. Through detailed documentation of Gordon's career—newspaper articles, reviews, letters, and other archival material—the author demonstrates the scope of Gordon's cultural impact. The result is a detailed account of Taylor's musical education, his career as a vaudeville performer, the remarkable performance history of Johnson and Gordon, his status as an in-demand celebrity singer and author, his time as a radio star, and, finally, his descent into madness. Can't Stand Still brings Taylor Gordon back to the center of the stage.