Department of English
Arnold Johnston
Click here for a sample of creative work
ARNOLD JOHNSTON has a Ph.D. from the University of Delaware and teaches playwriting, fiction, and poetry in the MFA program at Western Michigan University. His students have won considerable recognition over the years, including prizes, publication, and production; in 1990 they nominated him successfully for the WMU Alumni Association's Teaching Excellence Award.
Arnie's successfully-staged plays include The Witching Voice (WMU Press), Scrimshaw, The Edge of Running Water, Suitors, and Closer to Brel (a musical revue). He also served as writer-editor for the NPR-award-winning Bicentennial radio series, Voices from Michigan's Past. Two more revues featuring his translations of songs by the noted Belgian singer-songwriter Jacques Brel--Brel: 1’Escapade de Musique and Brel: Life Dance--have received in New York productions.
Arnie's extensive collaborations with his wife Deborah Ann Percy include numerous full-length plays, including The Zamboni Situation, Automatic Telling, Rasputin in New York, and Beyond Sex (all of which have had Off-Off Broadway stagings by Love Creek Productions); and Small Slam, Giving Up the Ghost, Out In the Forty-Five, and Traveling to Tulum. Their many one-acts appear regularly in festivals around the country and have been published in Dirty Word, Libido, Rockford Review, Art & Understanding, The Envelope, Please, and Alabama Literary Review; a number of their half-hour radio dramas have been broadcast on WMUK-FM’s All Ears Theatre. Debby and Arnie have also collaborated with poet Dona Rosu in translating two long one-acts by prominent Romanian playwright Hristache Popescu: Night of the Passions (Noaptea Patimilor) and Sons of Cain (Fiii Lui Cain), published in a single volume by Editura HP (Bucharest, 1999). Rosu and her daughter Luciana Costea have translated the Johnston-Percy play Rasputin in New York into Romanian, and this play also appears in a 1999 Romanian-English edition by Editura HP. Arnie and Debby have won the Dogwood and Market House one-act competitions, the Writer's Digest Script Competition, and Sunset Center's Festival of Firsts; they have also won recognition and/or production from Actors' Theatre of Louisville, Clemson University, the Attic Theatre Centre (LA), the University of Arkansas, Georgia College, the University of St. Thomas (Houston, TX), Theatre Memphis, Samuel French, New Dramatists, and the West Coast Ensemble.
Arnie's poetry, fiction, and non-fiction have also appeared widely in literary journals; he has published a critical study of William Golding's novels, Of Earth and Darkness (Missouri, 1980), and a chapbook of poetry, What the Earth Taught Us (March Street Press, 1996). He has made two record albums of Robert Burns’ songs and poems, and a CD of his Brel translations, Jacques Brel: I’m Here! (1997). Johnston is listed in numerous national and international directories of writers and performers; he has received grants and awards from such organizations as Western Michigan University, the Michigan Council for the Arts, the Kalamazoo Foundation, the Irving S. Gilmore Foundation, and the American Association of University Professors; and he is a winner of Kalamazoo's Community Medal of Arts. He is also an actor-singer with some over 100 roles and many concert performances to his credit. A member of the Dramatists Guild, he is also a resident playwright with AAI Productions (NYC).
TEL:(269 381-6316. E-MAIL: arnie.johnston@wmich.edu.