The Calloway County Public Library announces a book discussion event featuring Kentucky Humanities 2024 Kentucky Reads A Statewide literacy initiative featuring Scissors, Paper, Rock by Fenton Johnson.
MURRAY, KY. (May 6, 2024)—The Calloway County Public Library will host a Kentucky Reads discussion of Fenton Johnson’s Scissors, Paper, Rock on Sunday, June 2, at 2:00 PM at 710 Main Street, Murray, KY.
Leading the discussion will be Constance Alexander, an award-winning author, poet, and scholar.
Copies of the novel, generously provided by the Kentucky Humanities, are now available for checkout from the Calloway County Public Library. Additionally, the book is also available in ebook format from CCPL’s Kentucky Libraries Unbound.
Scissors, Paper, Rock is the story of Raphael Hardin, who, along with his siblings, left his childhood home in rural Kentucky. Grappling with an AIDS diagnosis, he returns to care for his dying father. Told from the perspectives of Raphael, his family, and their lifelong neighbor, Fenton Johnson's landmark novel reveals the blood struggles and binding loves of a broken family made whole.
Fenton Johnson is the author of At the Center of All Beauty: Solitude and the Creative Life, a New York Times Editors’ Pick. He is the author of the novels The Man Who Loved Birds, Scissors, Paper, Rock, and Crossing the River. In nonfiction, Johnson has published Geography of the Heart: A Memoir and Keeping Faith: A Skeptic’s Journey among Christian and Buddhist Monks. Geography received the American Library Association and Lambda Literary Awards for best LGBT Creative Nonfiction while Keeping Faith received a Lambda Literary and Kentucky Literary Award in Creative Nonfiction. His collection Everywhere Home: A Life in Essays (2017) touches on topics as diverse as San Francisco in the AIDS epidemic to spirituality to a youthful encounter with Ike and Tina Turner. A regular contributor to Harper’s Magazine,
Johnson has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts in both fiction and nonfiction and has been featured on Terry Gross’s Fresh Air. He has written the narrations and served as associate producer on several award-winning, internationally screened documentaries, among them Stranger with a Camera and La Ofrenda: Days of the Dead. He has taught in the graduate programs of Columbia University, New York University, Sarah Lawrence College, and San Francisco State University. At present, he is an emeritus professor at the University of Arizona and teaches writing workshops across the nation. He is currently writing the histories of his enslaved and slave-owning Kentucky ancestors as well as that of his great-grandfather, a Union soldier.
Kentucky Humanities’ first edition of Kentucky Reads, in 2018, featured Kentucky native Robert Penn Warren’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, All the King’s Men, to guide statewide conversations on contemporary populism, political discourse, and their relationship to journalism.
Kentucky Humanities is a non-profit Kentucky corporation affiliated with the National Endowment for the Humanities. For information about Kentucky Humanities’ programs and services, including Kentucky Reads, visit kyhumanities.org.
CCPL’s Kentucky Read Book Discussion is presented free of charge and is open to all. No registration is required. For more information, interested persons may email contactccpl@callowaycountylibrary.org.