Just To Spend a Little Time With You: A Lifetime of Writing Poetry

James Monroe Johnson, born in the Mississippi Delta, started writing in the second grade of elementary school. His teachers encouraged him throughout his elementary and highschool years, and surprisingly, he found professorial encouragement in college. During his years in the Army, and especially the two years he served in Vietnam, he wrote letters and poems for his buddies who sent them to their wives and girlfriends. James graduated from Okolona College, where he recorded his first poem, as he wrote songs for The Twilighters - a band in which he played guitar and bass. After nine years in the military, he enrolled at University of Miami, where he graduated in 1975. Moving back home to his Native Mississippi - then westward to Houston, then Dallas, Texas, he kept on writing. Back home, on the Gulf Coast for awhile, he traveled extensively- on and off the job - and finally in California, he wrote considerably. Having lived in, or spent at least one night, in forty-eight of the fifty states (he regrets having missed Vermont and New Hampshire), the author feels inspired to share his experiences with others. Being a lifelong lover of books, and poetry in particular, he read often and with the coming of educational channels on television and the internet, he enriched his life tremendously through reading and watching.