Lacy M. Johnson
“One of the reasons that I dislike the impulse to tie things up in a neat little bow and to find an answer for the questions that I’m asking in these essays, is because I’m hoping to show that none of these journeys are done, and that I end in a different place from where I began—I will continue to change and grow, and my thinking will evolve.”
“Whether grappling with her own experiences of sexual violence and the justice system or her hometown’s struggle to recover from a devastating flood, Johnson always writes with clear eyes and an enormous heart.”
“The Reckonings is not a book about changing the world. Its philosophy in disguise, equal parts memoir, criticism, and ethics. It has bits of Eula Biss, Leslie Jamison, and Simone Weil, but its patron saint is Grace Paley ... The 12 essays in The Reckonings are 12 beginnings. Each one deserves great consideration, while you read it and long after. Each one leaves the work up to you.”
“Ferociously beautiful and courageous, Johnson’s intimate story sheds light on the perpetuation of violence against women.”
“The tension between fact and perception forms the book’s intellectual backbone, and though The Other Side begins as a true-crime story, it flowers into an investigation of memory. Despite the subject matter, Johnson never wallows in bleakness. Her writing style is engaging and redemptive, a trick accomplished partly by virtue of Johnson’s voice—clear and direct, but with a breezy archness that belies her story’s dark core. Upon seeing her possessions in a Ziploc bag marked EVIDENCE, Johnson writes: “Nice to meet you, Evidence.” Elsewhere she exhibits both the touch of a poet (blood in her mouth becomes “the taste of a penny stolen from the kitchen jar”) and a novelist’s eye for character-fleshing detail (her mother addresses crises with Cool Ranch Doritos).”
“I was riveted by Trespasses—written with the haunting interiority of poetry and the compelling drive of prose. Much like being caught in a novel by Faulkner or Morrison, I found myself thinking about large important issues without initially understanding how Lacy Johnson’s language carried me there.”
Lacy M. Johnson is 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. Her other books include 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 (University of Texas Press, 2022).
Her writing 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. 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, the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts, Inprint, and Millay Colony for the Arts.
In an interview with Sophie Newman at The Journal, she was asked about her definition of justice, which can be anything that "makes the condition of joy a possibility again.” She responded, “if we believe that justice means finding a way to make the condition of joy a possibility again, then justice means we not only address the harm but also the structural inequities that made that harm possible in the first place. Working toward one another’s mutual joy would not only be a powerful act of resistance against ongoing injustices, but would also be profoundly healing for us all.”
A Houston-based professor, curator, and activist, Johnson 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, where she was both an Erhardt Fellow and Inprint Fondren Fellow. She teaches creative nonfiction at Rice University and is the Founding Director of the Houston Flood Museum.
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