With her new e-book out now, “Blueprints for Better Worlds,” and the upcoming release of her new collection of short stories, “Broken Fevers,” due out this year, Johnson is giving us lots to ponder.
Johnson’s identity, like her work, contains traces of her Kentucky upbringing; while she left her home state immediately after high school, she’s aware of its influence in her writing.
I don’t place the majority of my stories in Kentucky,” said Johnson, “but I do feel a sort of responsibility to represent Kentucky in a broader fashion than it’s been represented.”
Her writing also appears in the anthologies “Sycorax’s Daughters,” a collection of “dark” fiction and poetry by black women writers, “Stories for Chip: A Tribute to Samuel R. Delany,” in honor of the legendary gay sci-fi writer and intellectual, and “Shades of Blue and Gray: Ghosts of the Civil War,” ghost stories inspired by the American war fought over the repeal of slavery and its inherent social, economic and political fallout.
At this point in time, that may be enough to get us through the pandemic and onto a new world, a post-COVID-19 world, perhaps, a world that has learned lessons that can only be taught through the hard times Johnson’s stories explore.
