Johnny Payne

Johnny Payne is a dramatist, novelist, scholar, and has been a professor at the University of Texas at El Paso and Florida Atlantic University's Boca Raton campus. He has been head of a Northwestern University Latin American Studies program in Cusco, Peru.

Payne received his bachelor's degree in Comparative Literature at Indiana University and was awarded an Master of Fine Arts at the University of Alabama. He completed his PhD at Stanford University.

Payne conducted fieldwork in the Quechua highlands of Peru and has published two books from this research. Cuentos cusqueños is a dual language text, in both Quechua and Spanish, and gives stories told by several Quechua native speakers. She-Calf and Other Quechua Folk Tales is a translation of Quechua folktales into English.

Payne also wrote the novel Kentuckiana.

Works

Novels

• "La Muerte de Papi" (2014)
• "Vassal: Poems of Odysseus" (2014)
• "Silver Dagger" (2011)
• "Second Chance* (2010)
• North of Patagonia (2001)
• Kentuckiana (1997)
• The Ambassador’s Son
• Baja (1998)
• Chalk Lake (1996)

Plays

• The Devil in Disputanta
• The Serpent’s Lover

Literary Ethnography

• She-Calf and Other Quechua Folk Tales (2001)
• Cuentos cusqueños (1984)

Non-fiction

• Conquest of the New Word: Experimental Fiction and Translation in the Americas (1993)
• Voice and Style (1995)
• “Talking Around Terrorism: A Conference Report”. Telos 74 (Winter 1987-88). New York: Telos Press.

Translations

• with Phyllis Silverstein Teresa Porzecanski, 'Sun Inventions'; 'Perfumes of Carthage': Two Novellas (2000)

References

(1) Delia Poey, Hopscotch: A Cultural Review 2.4 (2001) 173-174. (2) Arthur Salm, San Diego Union-Tribune. (3) Elizabeth Redden, "Going Borderless and Bilingual, Inside Higher Ed, January 5, 2007.