A conversation with literary scholar Michael K. Johnson about their book, Speculative Wests: Popular Representations of a Region and Genre (University of Nebraska Press, 2023).

 Michael K. Johnson is Professor of American literature at the University of Maine at Farmington. His primary research areas are African American Literature and the literature and culture of the American West.

Johnson's other works include:

Black Masculinity and the Frontier Myth in American Literature (University of Oklahoma Press, 2002)

Hoo-Doo Cowboys and Bronze Buckaroos: Conceptions of the African American West (University Press of Mississippi, 2015)

Can’t Stand Still: Taylor Gordon and the Harlem Renaissance (University Press of Mississippi, 2019)

Weird Westerns: Race, Gender, Genre (University of Nebraska Press, 2020)

A Black Woman’s West: The Life of Rose B. Gordon (Montana Historical Society Press, 2022)

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 Podcast Notes:

• Host and Producer Brenden W. Rensink is Associate Director of the Redd Center, an Associate Professor of History at BYU, General Editor of the Intermountain Histories project, and author of the 2018 book Native but Foreign: Indigenous Immigrants and Refugees in the North American Borderlands. Links to other publications and projects here: https://linktr.ee/bwrensink