Lacy M. Johnson

Lacy M. Johnson is a Houston-based artist, curator, professor and activist. She is author of THE OTHER SIDE (Tin House, 2014), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Autobiography, for an Edgar Award in Best Fact Crime, for the CLMP Firecracker Award in Nonfiction, was a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writer Selection for 2014, and was named one of the best books of 2014 by Kirkus, Library Journal, and the Houston Chronicle. She is also author of TRESPASSES: A MEMOIR (University of Iowa Press, 2012), and is co-creator of the location-based storytelling project [the invisible city]. She worked as a cashier at WalMart, sold steaks door-to-door, and puppeteered with a traveling children’s museum before earning a PhD from University of Houston’s Creative Writing Program. As a writer and artist she has been awarded grants and fellowships from the Houston Arts Alliance, the Sustainable Arts Foundation, Kansas Arts Commission, the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts, Inprint, and Millay Colony for the Arts. Her work has appeared in Tin House, Dame, Fourth Genre, Creative Nonfiction, GOOD, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere, and has been anthologized in The Racial Imaginary (edited by Claudia Rankine et al.) and Literature: The Human Experience. She currently teaches interdisciplinary art at University of Houston.