Amanda Johnston

Amanda Johnston (she/her) is a writer, an artist, and the 2024 Texas Poet Laureate. She earned an MFA in creative writing from the University of Southern Maine. She is the author of the collection Another Way to Say Enter (Argus House Press, 2017). Her work has appeared in online and print publications including Callaloo, Poetry magazine, Puerto del Sol, Muzzle, Furious Flower: Seeding the Future of African American Poetry (Northwestern University Press, 2019), and Women of Resistance: Poems for a New Feminism (OR Books, 2018). She has received fellowships, grants, and awards from Cave Canem, Hedgebrook, Tasajillo, the Kentucky Foundation for Women, The Watermill Center, and the Austin International Poetry Festival. She is a former board president of the Cave Canem Foundation, a member of the Affrilachian Poets, the cofounder of Black Poets Speak Out, and the founder of Torch Literary Arts.

Johnston’s work has been featured on Bill Moyers, the Poetry Society of America’s series In Their Own Words, The Moth Radio Hour, and the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day series. She was commissioned to curate a collection of poems for the Poetry Coalition on the theme “Where My Dreaming and My Loving Live: Poetry & the Body.” She has facilitated creative writing workshops and presented at the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics; Hugo House; Langston Hughes House; Frye Art Museum; George Washington Carver Museum, Cultural and Genealogy Center; Brooklyn Museum; Prizer Arts and Letters; NeoSoul Poetry Lounge; Nuyorican Poets’ Café; Kelly Strayhorn Theater; Pillsbury House Theatre; and universities and literary venues across the country.