Fenton Johnson (May 7, 1888 – September 17, 1958) was an American poet, essayist, author of short stories, editor, and educator.

[4] Following school, Fenton worked as a messenger and in the post office before he began to teach English at the State University of Louisville (SUL), which was a private, black, Baptist-owned institution in Kentucky that would later would be known as Simmons College.

[4] Earlier, in 1909, Johnson appears to have submitted for publication a form of realistic-fiction diary, titled "A Wild Plaint", written in the name of a character, Aubrey Gray.

[1][5] This manuscript, which remained unpublished, is "a vivid depiction of discrimination", with the entries "alternately optimistic, angry, depressed, and frustrated.

"[6] Between the release of his first and second collection of poetry, Johnson moved to New York, where he attended the Columbia School of Journalism with the financial support of a benefactor.

The Champion was formed in conjunction with Henry Bing Dismond, his cousin, who was also an aspiring poet and popular athlete, one of the few African-American college graduates chosen for officer training with the Army's Eighth Illinois Regiment at Camp Des Moines in 1918.

[8] In addition, Johnson found publication in the anthology selected by poet Alfred Kreymborg in 1915 called Others: A Magazine of the New Verse.

Directed by Arna Bontemps, part of the Federal Writers’ Project focused on writing about the black experience in Illinois.

The poetry of Fenton Johnson has often been seen by critics to be characterized by great irony and a kind of hopelessness resulting from an embattled African American experience.

Fenton Johnson is often seen as a poet who possesses a particularly fatalistic perspective branching from his experience as an African American, and this type of embittered poetry is what he is most known for.

"[9] While "Tired" has been frequently anthologized, Johnson's earlier poems were made in more "conventional modes", including dialect poetry, as found in his first book, A Little Dreaming.

[9] In Visions of the Dusk and Songs of the Soil, Johnson begins to incorporate "Negro spirituals", and here the transition into themes more heavily influenced by the African-American experience might be observed.

Silliman was particularly enthralled by Johnson’s The Minister, which he argues, is the 'first instance in English of a prose poem which calls attention to a discursive or poetic effect.'