ABOUT

L. A. Johnson is from California. She is the author of the chapbook Little Climates (Bull City Press). She received an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University and a PhD in literature and creative writing from the University of Southern California, where she was a Provost’s Fellow. She is currently a Mellon Humanities and the University of the Future postdoctoral fellow at the University of Southern California.

Her poems have been awarded the 2022 Mississippi Review Poetry Prize, the 2022 Robert Watson Prize from The Greensboro Review, the 2021 Gregory Djanikian Scholarship from The Adroit Journal, and the 2021 Rumi Prize in Poetry from Arts & Letters.

Her work appears or is forthcoming in The Atlantic, The American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, POETRY, The Southern Review, ZYZZYVA, and other journals. Her poem “Invented Landscape” was featured on The Slowdown, in which Major Jackson writes “[L. A. Johnson’s] poem articulates a resolute wish that many poets share, to reorder our consciousness toward beauty.”

She is a recipient of numerous scholarships and fellowships: a VSC Fellowship from Vermont Studio Center, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Scholarship from Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, a Tennessee Williams Scholarship from Sewanee Writers' Conference, the Sharon Olds Honorary Scholarship from Community of Writers, the Herman B. Wells Fellowship from Indiana University Writers’ Conference, an "Under 30" Scholarship from Mendocino Coast Writers' Conference. Her poems have been included in Best New Poets and included on Narrative Magazine's list of 30 Below 30.

She is the Assistant Poetry Editor at The Account: A Journal of Poetry, Prose, and Thought. She is the current leader of the Wednesday Night Poetry Workshop at Beyond Baroque. Alongside Elizabeth Metzger, she curates the poetry reading series The Long Freeway: Poets Read Los Angeles. Under Editor David St. John, she is an Associate Editor of Swirl & Vortex: Collected Poems of Larry Levis, forthcoming in 2026 from Graywolf Press.

Find her on Twitter.