SJC News:
SANTA FE — St. John’s College, the third-oldest college in the country, with campuses in Santa Fe and Annapolis, Maryland, and known for its distinctive Great Books curriculum, has launched BooksbyJohnnies.com, an online bookshelf featuring more than 1,000 works from faculty and alumni.
The collection includes Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalists, Academy Award and Emmy Award winners, Guggenheim fellows and New York Times best-sellers.
The website features a number of works by New Mexican-based authors, including past St. John’s College Santa Fe President John Agresto’s Death by Learning, which explores the value and demise of the liberal arts; a book on the social history of Albuquerque’s locomotive repair shops from alums Richard Flint and Shirley Cushing Flint; the financial book From Monk to Money Manager by Doug Lynam; and two how-to books on writing: Inside Story: Everyone’s Guide to Reporting and Writing Creative Nonfiction by Julia Goldberg and the popular best-seller, Writing Down the Bones, by Natalie Goldberg.
For those who love the lore of New Mexico and the West, books include John Aragon’s The Adventures of Don Valiente and the Apache Kid; Sandra Schwayder Sanchez’ The Secret of a Long Journey, Jon Hunner’s J. Robert Oppenheimer, the Cold War, and the Atomic West, and Ellen Dornan’s playful Forgotten Tales of New Mexico. Local Emmy Award winner Lee David Zlotoff’s many television hits, such as MacGyver and Hill Street Blues, are also on the site, which accepts produced screen and television plays.
“That we have such a treasure trove of written works from the members of our community is truly remarkable,” says St. John’s College Santa Fe President Mark Roosevelt. “Remarkable because we are a very small school, with less than 1,000 students at our two campuses. Remarkable because we have no writing departments nor majors of any kind. Remarkable because faculty tenure decisions are not based on research or publication activity. Rather, all students and faculty do the exact same thing for four years: read, talk and write about great books from across 3,000 years of history – and that’s created an environment that inspires.”
Books by Johnnies showcases the exceptional diversity of perspectives that comprise the St. John’s College community. The books display a curiosity for the most important human questions and explore them with a remarkable depth of independent thinking. Many books are also playful and light, from children’s books and romance novels to thrillers and more. The database includes a 2023 Audible Pick of the Year for History, a New Yorker Best Book of 2023, a Booklist Best of the Year, a book that has sold more than a million copies, a Cannes Best Screenplay Award Winner, and other critically acclaimed and award-winning works.
“It’s hard to think of a better preparation for a person who hopes to write books than to read the great, enduring, often very difficult books that have made the world of ideas that the writer hopes to expand, or even to revolutionize. And to do it in a community where reading is the central act of every day,” says National Book Award finalist Salvatore Scibona, a Santa Fe alum whose work is featured on the site and whose latest novel, The Volunteer, is set in New Mexico.
Visitors to the site will find curated collections of books on topics such as philosophy, arts and culture, science/technology/math, translations, education, the social sciences, sustainability, and more, along with a searchable database. The database crowdsources works from within the alumni and faculty community; each author submits and owns their own page, which includes a book image, description and link to view or purchase.
“It’s the philosophy at St. John’s that leads to writing excellence,” says Albuquerque-based Lee Munson, author of Rigged Money and fellow classmate of Scibona’s. “There are no textbooks; we read Euclid, Newton, Shakespeare, and Darwin — pushing us to interpret complex ideas directly from the greatest minds in history. Direct engagement with texts without the secondary interpretations or educational fads foster a higher level of introspection that is at the heart of great writing.”
ABOUT ST. JOHN’S COLLEGE
St. John’s College is the most distinctive liberal arts college in the country due to our interdisciplinary program, in which 200 of the most revolutionary great books from across 3,000 years of human thought are explored in student-driven, discussion-based classes. By probing world-changing ideas in literature, philosophy, mathematics, science, music, history, and more, students leave St. John’s with a foundation for success in such fields as law, government, research, STEM, media, and education. Located on two campuses in two historic state capitals—Annapolis, Maryland, and Santa Fe, New Mexico—St. John’s is the third-oldest college in the United States and has been hailed as the “most forward-thinking, future-proof college in America” by Quartz and as a “high-achieving angel hovering over the landscape of American higher education” by the Los Angeles Times. Learn more at sjc.edu.
