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Upwards of a hundred of Charles Johnson 's poems have appeared over the last dozen years in a range of magazines from Blade to The Rialto and anthologies including Needs be, Lodestones, Freedom rules and Beyond Bedlam. Born in 1942 in Birmingham, at the turn of the century Charles accepted early retirement from a career in public libraries - having been Librarian at Redditch for rather longer than he likes to admit. He co-founded (with Jane Clarke) Flarestack Publishing - for which they were joint runners-up in the Public Library Entrepreneur of the Year Awards 2000 - to produce poetry pamphlets, and the quarterly new poetry magazine Obsessed With Pipework, which accepts original poetry contributions from all over the English-speaking world. Led to writing poetry by Meister Eckhart's "discover what is in you. Announce it, pronounce it, produce it, give birth to it. God is always saying one thing. What is that one word? - it is God and creation", and taught by Matthew Sweeney, Roger Garfitt, Graham Mort and Gillian Allnutt, Charles is now a full-time poetry editor/publisher, and lives in Pilton, Somerset with his wife Roz and a tankful of tropical fish. Glenn Storhaug's Five Seasons Press published his first full-length poetry collection "The Feather-List Extracts" in June 2005. Gillian Allnutt said of Charles Johnson's early poems that she especially likes some of them "because they succeed in investing the ordinary with power and strangeness" and David Hart said of him—"a poetry inventor and adventurer if ever there was one". Other comments include: "It's all rather tentative, Charles" Peter Mortimer, IRON "Yours is a high risk strategy" Don Measham, STAPLE "Johnson is an exact, scrupulous writer... an impeccable judge" Roz Goddard, RAW EDGE
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