Some more bragging rights for Johnson

“Welcome to Braggsville, ” the 2015 satire about four Berkeley college students traveling to the Deep South to participate in an ill-fated Civil War re-enactment, continues bring welcome acclaim for Berkeley author T. Geronimo Johnson. This week the 47-year-old author and teacher was named the inaugural winner of the Simpson Family Literary Prize, a new award that recognizes writers in the middle arc of their careers.

In addition to the prestige, Johnson will receive $50,000, which he has indicated will help fuel the further progress of the novel he is working on.

“Braggsville,” which was in the running for both the National Book Award and the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction in 2015, was awarded Stanford University’s William Saroyan International Prize for Writing in 2016.

The new honor is administered by the Simpson Family Literary Project, a collaboration of the Lafayette Library and Learning Center Foundation and UC Berkeley’s English Department that supports artists, writers and underprivileged youth and is named after the late Bay Area philanthropist Barclay Simpson and his wife Sharon.

As its first recipient, Johnson will be making some public reading appearances in the fall and also serve a two-week residency at Berkeley and the Lafayette Library next year.

In expressing gratitude, the author described the novel now underway as one that “explores the convergence of Afro-futurism, global AI, the conomic imperatives that amplify cultural difference, corporate religion (in all manifestations) and tech inequity. The question behind this novel is the same question that animates my previous work: How do we learn to care about people who are not like us?”