State Artist Amanda Johnston

Description

2024 Texas Poet Laureate, Amanda Johnston, was born in East St. Louis, IL, and raised in Austin, TX. She began writing poetry while living in Kentucky. She earned an MFA in creative writing from the University of Southern Maine. She is the author of two chapbooks, GUAP and Lock & Key, and the full-length collection Another Way to Say Enter. Her work has appeared in Callaloo, Poetry Magazine, Puerto del Sol, Muzzle, and the anthologies, Furious Flower: Seeding the Future of African American Poetry and Women of Resistance: Poems for a New Feminism. She is the cofounder of Black Poets Speak Out, and founder of Torch Literary Arts. Named one of Blavity’s ’13 Black Poets You Should Know,’ Amanda’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 Life: Poetry & the Body. Photo by Cindy Elizabeth.