THIS WEEK’S MUSE
LEAH JOHNSON
“I write things. Sometimes those things are essays about pop culture and politics, and other times those things are books for children and young adults.”
Leah Johnson is an American writer. Her debut novel You Should See Me in a Crown—published in 2021—was named on the TIME ‘100 Best Young Adult Books Of All Time’ list.
Johnson was raised on the west side of Indianapolis, Indiana and is a self-confessed “lifelong Hoosier.” She was an avid reader as a child, and began her writing career early too, filling a spiral notebook full of short stories in fifth grade. She edited her high school’s newspaper and spent time as an intern at the Wall Street Journal and received her MFA in fiction writing from Sarah Lawrence College, New York.
She began working on You Should See Me In A Crown while at Sarah Lawrence. The story centers on a black queer teenager who runs for Prom Queen to win a college scholarship. Johnson described the book as an homage to the work that she loved – John Hughes movies of the eighties and the teen romantic comedies of the nineties—and wanted to see someone like her reflected in them as more than just quirky side character.
“I’d spent a lot of time looking back at the books I read when I was a kid, on the things I felt most acutely into my adulthood – isolation and alienness at the cross section of all of my identities. A lot of time [I was] thinking about what was missing from them and knew that all I wanted to do was write into those empty spaces.”
Another aspect of her writing process was to address the white, heterosexual bias that she saw in contemporary literature. “So many of the books I read when I was growing up were riddled,” she said. Adding, “none of those narratives included girls like me!”
Johnson wants her books, and the stories within her books, to be places of positivity and optimism; places where young girls fit in, “if nowhere else, then inside of their own bodies.”
She takes the job of writing for young people very seriously, because it’s about more than books. She sees her responsibility—as a female, black, queer, young novelist— to help shape young people into more equitable, honest, empathetic humans. “I never want to write down to teenage readers. They deserve someone who is going to tell them the truth.”
Johnson lives and works in Brooklyn. And when she’s not writing or ranting about pop culture and politics on Twitter, she is a professor of creative writing and composition.
HAPPENING
Eight Wednesdays, beginning July 6, from 3–5pm
Wild About Wilde!
With Mary Ann Eaton
Dive into the brilliant works and fascinating life of Oscar Wilde.
$115 – Member, $125 – Non-Member
DETAILS & TICKETS