Toni Ann Johnson

Toni Ann Johnson won the 2021 Flannery O'Connor Award for short fiction, selected by Roxane Gay, for her linked collection Light Skin Gone to Waste, forthcoming, October 15, 2022, from UGA Press. Her novella Homegoing won Accents Publishing's inaugural novella contest in 2020 and was published in May of 2021. A novel, Remedy For a Broken Angel was published in 2014 and subsequently nominated for a 2015 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work by a Debut Author. Johnson is also an award-winning screenwriter with a number of produced film and television credits. She won the 1998 Humanitas Prize for writing Ruby Bridges, a Disney film. In 2004, she won again for her teleplay Crown Heights, a film for Showtime. Johnson also co-wrote the feature film Step Up 2: The Streets. She has been a Sundance Screenwriter's Lab fellow, as well as Callaloo Writer's Workshop fellow at Brown University. Johnson has received support for her writing from The Hurston/Wright Foundation, One-Story Summer Conference, and The Prague Summer Program for Writers. She's been nominated for the Pushcart Prize twice. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in The Los Angeles Times, Callaloo, Hunger Mountain, The Coachella Review, and elsewhere.