Leah Johnson

Leah Johnson is an eternal midwesterner and author of award-winning books for children and young adults. Her bestselling debut YA novel, "You Should See Me in a Crown," was a Stonewall Honor Book, the inaugural Reese's Book Club YA pick and named a best book of the year by Amazon, Kirkus, Marie Claire, Publishers Weekly and New York Public Library. Johnson's essays and cultural criticism can be found in Teen Vogue, Harper's Bazaar and Cosmopolitan among others. Her sophomore novel, "Rise to the Sun" was released in 2021. Johnson is a 2021 Lambda Literary Emerging Writers Fellow and when she’s not writing or ranting about pop culture and politics on Twitter, she is a professor of creative writing and composition.

Johnson was born and raised in central Indiana — a tried and true, lifelong Hoosier (and as you can perhaps imagine, much of her work now features more cornfields and soybeans than any one human has business writing about). She began her writing career with a spiral notebook full of short stories in Mrs. Peacock's fifth-grade class and could never quite bring herself to stop. That love of storytelling eventually carried her to Sarah Lawrence College for her MFA in fiction writing, and to Brooklyn to live amongst every other struggling writer.

Johnson says she never felt like she saw herself in the young adult characters she read about as a teen, so she decided to write one herself. "You Should See Me in a Crown" was released to critical acclaim. The novel was a Junior Library Guild Selection, a 2021 ALA Rainbow List Top Ten selection and named one of Cosmopolitan's 15 Best Young Adult Books of 2020. Her sophomore novel, "Rise to the Sun" (2021) is the first installment of her debut middle grade series, "Ellie Engle Saves Herself."