Adam Johnson Biography

Adam Johnson is a Pulitzer Prize winning American novelist and short story writer. He won the Pulitzer for his 2012 novel The Orphan Master's Son. He is also a professor of English at Stanford University with a focus on creative writing.
Johnson was born in South Dakota and raised in Arizona. He earned a BA in Journalism from Arizona State University in 1992; an MFA from the writing program at McNeese State University in 1996; and a PhD in English from Florida State University in 2000. Johnson is currently a San Francisco writer and associate professor in creative writing at Stanford University. He founded the Stanford Graphic Novel Project and was named one of the nation's most influential and imaginative college professors by Playboy Magazine.
Johnson is the author of the novel The Orphan Master's Son (2012) which Michiko Kakutani writing in The New York Times has called a daring and remarkable novel a novel that not only opens a frightening window on the mysterious kingdom of North Korea but one that also excavates the very meaning of love and sacrifice. Johnson's interest in the topic arose from his sensitivity to the language of propaganda wherever it occurs. Johnson also wrote the short-story collection Emporium and the novel Parasites Like Us which won a California Book Award in 2003. His work has been published in Esquire Harper's Magazine Tin House and The Paris Review as well as Best New American Voices and The Best American Short Stories. Recently his short story George Orwell was a Friend of Mine was published by 21st Editions in The Janus Turn with photographs in platinum by George Tice.