Jocelyn Nicole Johnson Books in Order

Jocelyn Nicole Johnson was born in Virginia and grew up in Reston, outside Washington, D.C. As a teenager, she attended the University of Virginia’s Young Writers Workshop, an early sign that storytelling was already part of her life.

She later studied fine art and education at James Madison University. Rather than heading straight into publishing, Johnson built a long career teaching visual art in public schools, mostly to elementary-age children, while continuing to write.

The classroom stayed with her.

Johnson has described teaching as practice in bringing different people into a shared space, even when they do not initially want to be there. That interest in community, friction, and what people owe one another appears throughout her fiction. Her experience as an art teacher also helped shape how she approaches stories, especially the things that can be felt or seen before they can be easily said.

Her path to a first book took time. Johnson wrote for years, attended workshops and residencies, and had earlier projects go out on submission without being published. She wrote the stories and novella that became My Monticello gradually, from roughly 2015 through spring 2020, while she was still teaching full time.

Then, at 50, she published her debut.

Released in 2021, My Monticello brings together five short stories and a novella, with many of its characters living in or connected to Virginia. The title novella imagines Charlottesville in a near future marked by racist violence and environmental strain. Da’Naisha Love, a young Black woman descended from Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, helps lead neighbors seeking safety at Monticello itself.

Other pieces show the range of Johnson’s concerns. In Control Negro, a professor tries to test America’s racism through a cruelly personal experiment involving his own son. Virginia Is Not Your Home, Something Sweet on the Tongue, Buying a House Ahead of the Apocalypse, and The King of Xandria turn toward family history, schooling, migration, housing, and the uneasy search for safety. Readers drawn to sharp premises, morally difficult questions, and characters trying to make a home under pressure will find a lot to sit with here.

The collection received the Weatherford Award, the Library of Virginia Fiction Award, the Balcones Fiction Prize, and the Lillian Smith Award. Its short story Control Negro was also selected for The Best American Short Stories.

Johnson lives and writes in Charlottesville, Virginia. Her work keeps returning to the state’s landscapes and history, not as distant background, but as something her characters must live with in the present.