rhymes with papaya
Alaya Dawn Johnson is an award-winning author of speculative fiction for adults and young adults. Her most recent novel, Trouble the Saints, is forthcoming from Tor in June 2020.
She publishes a monthly newsletter via TinyLetter, which you can subscribe to here. It features writing advice, observations of life and eating in Mexico, and, of course, the latest news of her publications.
The dangerous magic of The Night Circus meets the powerful historical exploration of The Underground Railroad in this timely and unsettling novel, set against the darkly glamorous backdrop of New York City at the dawn of WWII. Amidst the whir of city life, a girl from Harlem is drawn into the glittering underworld of Manhattan, where she’s hired to […]
Winner of the Nebula award for Best Young Adult Novel Meet Bird: Emily Bird, the straight-A student with good hair and a perfect boyfriend, with a perfect Ivy-League future laid out in front of her. But a chance meeting with a government agent — at what should have been an ordinary party of Washington DC’s […]
Longlisted for the National Book Award and nominated for the Nebula award for best Young Adult novel, the Indie’s Choice Award and winner of the Cybils award Four hundred years in the future, in a world remade by plague and nuclear disaster, a young artist and a Summer King plot revolutionary art in the pyramid […]
The first novel of the Spirit Binders trilogy. In Racing the Dark, the first act in a grand dance of loyalty, love, sacrifice, and death is about to begin, set in a land of volcanoes and earthquakes, plagues and typhoons, of island nations separated by water but bound by fear of the spirits they imprison […]
Why, hello there! I figured that this website was in need of re-design, considering that I cobbled the last one together a decade ago (ahem). It features the normal things you expect from an author website: bibliography, bio, announcements of events (more on that later), and some excerpts from my novels and a few short stories. I have a bunch of new writing coming out in the next year. Most notably, a new adult from Tor called Trouble the Saints (watch this space for more news in the months to … Read More... about New website, new books, new stories
Alaya Dawn Johnson was born in Washington, DC in 1982, the first of three children. Both sides of her family have extensive ties to the DC metropolitan area. Her maternal grandfather bought the family home in southeast DC in the 1930s and raised ten children there as one of the first generation of African American government employees. Her father grew up in Lawrenceville, Virginia. Johnson attended high school at the National Cathedral School for girls and college at Columbia University, where she majored in East Asian Languages and Cultures. While studying abroad Japan, she hitchhiked … Read more about About