Lacy M. Johnson

Lacy M. Johnson is a Houston-based professor, curator, and activist, and is the author of THE RECKONINGS (Scribner, 2018), which was named a National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist in Criticism and one of the best books of 2018 by Boston Globe, Electric Literature, Autostraddle, Book Riot, and Refinery 29. She is also the author of THE OTHER SIDE (Tin House, 2014). 

For its frank and fearless confrontation of the epidemic of violence against women, The Other Side was named a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Autobiography, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, an Edgar Award in Best Fact Crime, the CLMP Firecracker Award in Nonfiction; it 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 the author of TRESPASSES: A MEMOIR (University of Iowa Press, 2012), which has been anthologized in The Racial Imaginary (Fence Books, 2015) and Literature: The Human Experience (Bedford / St. Martin’s, 2013-2018). She is co-editor, with Cheryl Beckett, of MORE CITY THAN WATER: A HOUSTON FLOOD ATLAS (the University of Texas Press, 2022).

She worked as a cashier at Walmart, sold steaks door-to-door, and puppeteered with a traveling children’s museum before earning a Ph.D. from the University of Houston’s Creative Writing Program, where she was both an Erhardt Fellow and Inprint Fondren Fellow. As a writer and artist, she has been awarded grants and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, Houston Endowment, Rice University's Humanities Research Center, Houston Arts Alliance, the Sustainable Arts Foundation, Kansas Arts Commission (may it rest in peace), the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts, Inprint, and Millay Colony for the Arts. 

Her work has appeared in the Best American Essays, Best American Travel Writing, the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Paris Review, Orion, Virginia Quarterly Review, Tin House, Guernica, Fourth Genre, Creative Nonfiction, Sentence, TriQuarterly, Gulf Coast and elsewhere. She teaches creative nonfiction at Rice University and is the Founding Director of the Houston Flood Museum.