Guy Johnson is a poet and author who is best known as the son of Maya Angelou. He was introduced to creative work very early in life as his mother had prints from the likes of Toulouse-Lautrec, Catlett, Charles White, Monet, Guauguin, Degas, Picasso, Samella Lewis and Van Gogh hanging on their walls. Angelou believed that exposure to creativity an art in a person’s life broadened their perspectives on life and the world they lived in. While he had a very creative mother who wanted to see him become a creative person, he spent much of his childhood unsuccessfully tying to ignore whatever he was taught. For most of his childhood, the art on the walls was irrelevant to the young Guy Johnson.
When Guy Johnson was thirteen to fourteen years old, his mother moved the family to New York City. In 1958 they started living in a small three bed roomed apartment in Crown Heights Brooklyn. His mother still earned a living giving private dance lessons and singing in nightclubs during the evenings. As such, the third bedroom was her dance studio and music room. Whenever Johnson’s mother had a singing gig most of which would last from between one and a half to two and a half months they would live well but almost starved when the contracts came to an end. As a teen, he went to college in Egypt and then went to Europe to manage Costa del Sol, a bar on the Spanish coast. He also worked on oil rigs in Kuwait, managed a photo safari service that catered to tourists in the Spanish Sahara, Algeria and Morocco. He then went back home to the US and for more than two decades he was a mid-level manager for the Oakland local government in California. During this time, he was writing poetry and his work has appeared in the anthology of black male poets “My Brother’s Keeper” and “Essence Magazine.” “Standing at the Scratch Line” the first of the “Tremain Family Saga” series is his first novel.
