Dana Johnson is the author of the short story collection In the Not Quite Dark. She is also the author of Break Any Woman Down, winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, and the novel Elsewhere, California. Both books were nominees for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, The Paris Review, and Callaloo, among others, and in several anthologies. Johnson is a professor of English at the University of Southern California.

(Photo credit: Ellie Partovi)