A. Rafael Johnson was born in upstate New York to parents from the Deep South. He grew up in New York, Arkansas, and Texas. His fiction and essays have appeared in Callaloo, Kweli Journal, African American Review, and Excavating Honesty: An Anthology of Rage and Hope in America. His first novel The Through was a finalist for the 2018 Minnesota Book Award. Johnson graduated from The University of Texas at Austin with a BA in Drama and holds an MFA in Creative Writing from The University of Alabama. Currently, Johnson is the Vice-President of Inspire to Change, where he uses the methodologies of the arts to understand systems, organizations, and programs, an adjunct faculty member at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, where he teaches classes in Storytelling and Narrative, Magical Realism, and Creative Analytics (with Nora Murphy Johnson), and a fellow at Kimbilio Fiction.
