George M. Johnson’s “Still Life With Nudes” has won several awards, including the Gladys Cameron Watt Award in the Ottawa Little Theatre’s 67th Canadian One Act Playwriting Competition and the National Playwriting Competition, sponsored by the Regina Little Theatre, which produced the one-act version in October 2009. It was published in Ryga: A Journal of Provocations and in the U.S.A. in 2013 by ArtAge Senior Resource Center. Another play, “Look Up, America,” was short-listed for the Tennessee Williams playwriting competition. A ten-Minute play, “Rest Assured,” was selected in 2011 by Los Angeles’s Little Fish Theatre for their “Pick of the Vine” production, and also for the InspiraTO Festival in Toronto. His Screenplay “The Wonder” was a Finalist in the British Independent Film Festival Competition. Most recently his screenplay “Peace Pledge” received Honorable Mention in the Euroscript Screenplay Competition (London) and was a Finalist in the Script Doctor “Contest of Contest Winners Screenplay Competition” in L.A.. Johnson is Professor and Chair of the English and Modern Languages Department at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, British Columbia, where he teaches creative writing and literature.

NOTE: The idea for “Mockus” came from hearing activist Mary –Wynne Ashford speak about the anti-politician Mayors of Bogotá, Colombia, particularly Antanas Mockus, and by the description in her book Enough Blood Shed: 101 Solutions to Violence, Terror and War. Mockus employed creative antics, such as replacing corrupt traffic cops with street mimes and developing a “vaccine against violence” to encourage people to overcome the city’s severe social and environmental ills, with varying degrees of success. Mockus held the Mayor’s office twice, from 1995-97 and 2001-2003. During his second term he turned fifty (he was born in in 1952 and the second term ran from 2001-03).