LACY M. JOHNSON is a Houston-based professor, curator, activist, and is author of four books, including THE RECKONINGS (Scribner, 2018) and THE OTHER SIDE (Tin House, 2014) — both National Book Critics Circle Award Finalists. She is also co-editor, with Cheryl Beckett, of MORE CITY THAN WATER: A HOUSTON FLOOD ATLAS (University of Texas Press, 2022), winner of the 2022 Art in Service to the Environment Award from the Texas Sierra Club. Her most recent book, THE PAST AND POSSIBLE WORLD, will publish in March 2027 from Scribner. 

She worked as a cashier at WalMart, sold steaks door-to-door, and puppeteered with a traveling children’s museum before earning a PhD from University of Houston’s Creative Writing Program. As a writer and artist, she has been awarded grants and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, Houston Endowment, Rice University's Humanities Research Center, Houston Arts Alliance, the Sustainable Arts Foundation, Kansas Arts Commission (may it rest in peace), the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts, Inprint, and Millay Colony for the Arts. Her work has appeared in the Best American Essays, Best American Science and Nature Writing, Best American Travel Writing, the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Paris Review, Orion, Virginia Quarterly Review, Tin House, and elsewhere. She is the Founding Director of the HOUSTON FLOOD MUSEUM and a Contributing Editor at ORION. She currently teaches creative nonfiction at Rice University, where she holds the Bruce and Elizabeth Dunlevie Chair in English and is Founding Director of the MFA in Creative Writing.