Toni Ann Johnson won the 2024 Screen Door Press Prize for Fiction with her linked collection, BUT WHERE’S HOME? (UPK 2026).

In 2021, she won the Flannery O’Connor Award for her linked short story collection LIGHT SKIN GONE TO WASTE (UGA Press 2022). The collection was shortlisted for an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work, and also shortlisted for the Saroyan Prize.

A novella, HOMEGOING, won Accents Publishing’s inaugural novella contest in 2020 and was released in May of 2021.

Short fiction and essays have been published in The Emerson Review, Hunger Mountain, Fiction Magazine, Callaloo, The Los Angeles Times, and elsewhere.

A novel, Remedy For a Broken Angel, was published in 2014 and received a nomination for a 2015 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work by a Debut Author.

Johnson is a screenwriter with a number of produced projects to her credit including, Ruby Bridges (ABC), Crown Heights (Showtime), The Courage to Love (Lifetime) the TV pilot, Save The Last Dance (Fox Television), and the feature film, Step Up 2: The Streets (Summit Entertainment). 

Early life, education, and career

Johnson was raised in Monroe, New York, in an upper-middle-class family. Her father, Dr. William L. Johnson, earned a Ph.D. in psychology from Yeshiva University and a postdoctoral degree in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy from Adelphi University. He studied with Theodor Reik, who was a student of Sigmund Freud. Dr. Johnson was appointed chief psychologist at Orange County Mental Health Clinic in Goshen, NY in the early 1960s. He was the first African-American in that position. Dr. Johnson was in private practice in Monroe and in New York City in Greenwich Village until 2013, when his health declined. His book, Cosmologic Triadic Drive Theory: The Physics of the Psyche , was published posthumously in 2018.

The Johnsons were among the first Black families to live in Monroe. Johnson’s mother, Vera Peterkin Johnson, opened an antique business in the Monroe area in the late 1960s. Vera Johnson Antiques remained in business near Monroe in Tuxedo until 2025.

Johnson was educated in the Monroe area from nursery school through high school. She has published short stories based on her experience in the area. Three of her books, Homegoing, Light Skin Gone to Waste, and But Where’s Home? are works of auto-fiction based on her family’s experience.

The Johnsons traveled abroad extensively in the 60s and 70s, making repeated trips to Europe, North and West Africa, Asia, and Turkey. Dr. Johnson served briefly on assignment for the Peace Corps in Ankara. An English teacher at Monroe-Woodbury Junior High publicly accused Johnson of lying when she told the class that she’d been to Japan. It was inconceivable to some locals that Black Americans could have the means or interest to travel to Asia in the 1970s.

Eager to leave the area, Johnson, a member of the National Honor Society, acquired the necessary credits to graduate from Monroe-Woodbury High School a year early at age 16 to enter New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.

Johnson continued classes each summer at NYU, including a summer semester in London where she studied modern drama in performance and English literature. While enrolled in NYU, she studied screenwriting with Arnaud D’usseau and Venable Herndon. At 20, Johnson graduated from NYU and began studying script interpretation with Stella Adler, and playwriting with Charles Fuller (A Soldier’s Story), Judi Ann Mason (A Star Ain’t Nothin’ but a Hole in Heaven), and Leslie Lee (First Breeze of Summer). She later enrolled as a non-matriculated graduate student at City College of New York in Harlem and studied playwriting for several years with Arthur Kopit (Nine, Phantom of the Opera). At CCNY, she also studied African literature with Chinua Achebe.

During this time, Johnson was working as a professional actress, a member of Equity, SAG, and AFTRA, and appearing in plays in New York, and regionally (at The Cleveland Playhouse) and in movies and television, including films with Spike Lee, two ABC soap operas, All My Children and Loving, and a CBS School-Break Special, “What if I’m Gay?” She also studied jazz vocals. After auditioning for a musical by Paul Streitz, Streitz paid for her voice lessons with renowned vocal coach Robert Marks for over a year. Emory Taylor (director of Harlem Opera Society) later taught her on scholarship for several years. She performed in showcases and in Taylor’s Harlem Opera Society jazz musical, “Solomon and Sheba,” in Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center.

Johnson produced her first play, Mommy Loves You, at the William Redfield Theater in New York City’s theater district. Later that year, Johnson and several women colleagues in the group Black Women In Theater, along with playwright Leslie Lee, collaborated to create Here in my Father’s House, a play that ran off-Broadway, first at the Lambs Theater, and then at NEC’s Theater Four. Samuel L. Jackson and James Pickens played roles in the productions, as did the co-writers of the piece: Johnson, Ellen Cleghorne, Jewel Brimage, Cheryl Lane, and Zelda Patterson.

Her subsequent play, Gramercy Park is Closed to the Public, received numerous staged readings with Johnson in the lead role. The debut was at Frank Silver Writer’s Workshop in Harlem (Carla Brothers played the lead role). Later, the Ensemble Studio Theatre produced it for their Octoberfest. The New York Stage and Film Company produced the play as a main-stage production during their 1999 summer Powerhouse Theater session at Vassar College. It starred Nicole Ari Parker, David Warshofsky, and Eddie Cahill.

In 1992, Johnson moved from New York to Los Angeles, where she transitioned into screenwriting after Gramercy Park is Closed to the Public garnered the attention of literary agent Dave Wirtshafter, and she began writing for studios and networks, including Disney, Warner Brothers, Paramount, Fox, HBO, ABC, Summit Entertainment, Lifetime, and Showtime. 

After graduating from Antioch University Los Angeles in 2008, Johnson’s creative focus switched to writing fiction, and she’s been fortunate to have been published frequently from 2013 to the present.