Alaya Dawn Johnson, an-award winning author, currently serves as visiting associate professor in the English Department and Master of Fine Arts Program (MFA) in Creative Writing and Literary Translation at Queens College. Dedicated to introducing students to a variety of genres in writing and literature, QC invites a new writer to the faculty every year. Johnson brings her experience in speculative fiction, including subgenres like fantasy and science fiction, to expand students’ horizons and encourage them to speculate about the nature of our reality.
Johnson currently teaches an undergraduate introduction to creative writing and a graduate MFA craft focus workshop, focusing on the craft of speculative fiction. She guides her students in exploring critical themes of people and movement, immigration, and colonization through the supernatural, including vampires. Whether or not students are familiar with speculative fiction, Johnson fosters a space for students to experiment with magic while exploring questions of humanity, peace and justice.
“Right now, I’m having this glorious experience of really focusing on these novels and short stories that I love, but with the excuse of having a class, I get to go back and reread them and really think about them from a perspective of a writer in a craft sense,” Johnson said.
Johnson has loved writing since she was little. She attended a Montessori school, which gave her the agency to dive deeply into her interests. She spent a considerable amount of time exploring literature and even began to draft her own novels. By the time she graduated college, she published her first short story, and her first novel, “Racing in the Dark,” was released in 2007. As of now, she has published a total of seven novels and a collection of short stories. Some of her recent works of young adult literature include “Trouble the Saints” and “The Library of Broken Worlds,” which she had a read-aloud session for at QC earlier this semester.
“To me, young adult literature, I love it because it’s about that moment of realizing of entering your adulthood and understanding the world from the perspective of an adult for the first time,” Johnson said. “That moment of realizing that people lied to you. That things aren’t the way you wanted them to be. That you have to make these decisions for yourself that you hadn’t realized that you were going to have to make, or that you thought would be simple. Or that your dreams might not be things that will actually make you happy or they aren’t what you thought they were.”
Currently, Johnson is working on a historical fiction novel set in Mexico, where she and her partner reside. The story is a “what if” scenario set during Spanish conquistador Hernan Cortes’s campaign against the Aztec Empire — imagining what would happen if an alien ship appeared. Instead of a straightforward conquista, it is interrupted. Johnson plans to rewrite history with a quartet of a biracial slave, a Mexica, the son of another Native American group, and an alien. She hopes to have the novel drafted by the end of the year.
For students applying to the MFA program and interested in getting into speculative fiction, Johnson will be teaching this year and next year. While she’s at QC, she hopes to work with students and learn from them.
“I really hope that I’ll be able to come out of this experience with a deeper appreciation of craft … and maybe get better myself. You know I’m always hoping to get better at writing no matter what,” she said.
