Lee Clay Johnson, photo by Sasha Wiseman
Tickets
General Ticket: $25
Member Ticket: $22
The church is thrilled to welcome Lee Clay Johnson! The award-winning author of Nitro Mountain is joined by his family of bluegrass musicians for a unique evening of music and storytelling. Weaving together music and excerpts from his second newly released novel, Bloodline ( April 2026, Panamerica), Johnson is both entertaining and illuminating, deepening the connection to the landscape of the novel. Following the unique performance there will be a Q&A with the author and musician.
Set deep in rural Tennessee, Bloodline explores a generational saga of mendacious transformations. The mesmerizing dark comedy is an exploration of masculinity run amuck and the celebration of femininity’s strength and resolve. It is an honest examination of the burdens of heritage & history and the journey of reclamation.
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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 classes, 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 Debroah Eisenberg and others, and in 2016 he published his first novel, Nitro Mountain which won the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts & Letters. His fiction and nonfiction works have appeared in Country Highway, The Southampton Review, Ploughshares, Lit Hub, Oxford American, The Common, Appalachian Heritage, Salamander, Mississippi Review, and more. He served as a fellow at the Sewanee Writer’s Conference. He now lives in Providence, 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.