My Monticello

A young woman descended from Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings driven from her neighborhood by a white militia. A university professor studying racism by conducting a secret social experiment on his own son. A single mother desperate to buy her first home even as the world hurtles toward catastrophe. What Ms. Johnson’s main characters all have in common is the fight to survive in a version of America eerily similar to the one we live in now.

If we refuse to face the past, then we are doomed to repeat it—or worse. That’s the stern imprecation behind these stories that, like Paul Beatty’s The Sellout, rely on playfulness of form to pack a wallop in the way of meaning.

Jocelyn Nicole Johnson’s fiction debut, My Monticello, won the Library of Virginia Fiction Award, the Weatherford Award, the Balcones Fiction Prize, and the Lillian Smith Award. A short story from the collection, “Control Negro,” was anthologized in The Best American Short Stories, guest edited by Roxane Gay. Ms. Johnson’s writing has also appeared in Guernica, The Guardian, Kweli Journal, Joyland, Lit Hub, and elsewhere. A former public school art teacher, she lives and works in Charlottesville, Virginia.

“I often write to find out what I know,” says Jocelyn Nicole Johnson, in this conversation about how art and life came to be mingled in My Monticello.

Join us

Jocelyn Nicole Johnson will be at Colgate on Thursday, Nov. 2, at 4:30 p.m. EDT. Join us physically in the Persson Hall auditorium or register to join us virtually via Zoom. The in-person audience will be able to participate in a post-reading Q&A and book-signing. Everyone is welcome. Admission is free.

Want to find out what thoughtful readers are saying about My Monticello? Join Colgate faculty and students on Monday, Nov. 27, from 7-8 p.m. EST for a conversation about all three November Living Writers books. (No preparation is required.) Register here.

Go beyond the book

“On each page, My Monticello amplifies William Faulkner’s famous reflection: ‘The past is not dead. It’s not even past,’ ” writes The Guardian.
Jocelyn Nicole Johnson “reminds us of what fiction does best: reflect our reality back at us just when we need it most,” writes Brigett M. Davis in this New York Times review of My Monticello.
“It's been a hard set of years for a variety of reasons since 2017, notwithstanding the global pandemic. But I still do feel hope,” says Ms. Johnson in this NPR interview.
What did Thomas Jefferson really think of the “peculiar institution” of slavery? Read excerpts from his Notes on the State of Virginia here.
Here is a guide to the Burial Ground for Enslaved People at Monticello.