Johnson was born and raised in Winchester, Virginia and began writing poetry as a teenager.
[1] She received a BA/MT in English Education from the University of Virginia and an MFA in poetry from Warren Wilson College.
[2][3] She taught in public schools in San Francisco before beginning to teach at the college level, and spent ten summers working as staff at the UVA Young Writer’s Workshop.
Her poems have been selected for the collections The Best American Poetry 2012 Bodies Built for Game (University of Nebraska Press, 2019), Women of Resistance: Poems for a New Feminism (OR Books, 2018) and Troubling the Line: Trans & Genderqueer Poetics (Nightboat Books 2015).
"[7][5] She cites Marilyn Hacker and Larry Levis as influences and has said "Adrienne Rich and Audre Lorde are poets I read when I know I could be living and writing more courageously.