Mat Johnson (born August 19, 1970, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) is an American fiction writer who works in both prose and the comics format.

[1] Johnson was born and raised in the Germantown and Mount Airy communities in Philadelphia[2] His mother is African-American and his father is Irish Catholic.

[citation needed] The Great Negro Plot is a creative nonfiction that recounts the New York Slave Insurrection of 1741 and the resultant trial and hysteria.

[7] In February 2008, Vertigo Comics published Johnson's graphic novel Incognegro, a noir mystery that deals with the issue of passing and the lynching past of the American South.

On September 21, 2011, Johnson was awarded the Dos Passos Prize for Literature for his body of work focused on American themes and the human experience.