THOMAS JOHNSON teaches poetry and fiction as an education associate for Teachers and Writers Collaborative, New York, New York. He will complete the MFA in Creative Writing at the New School in the spring of 2026. He holds a Master of Arts in Writing from Johns Hopkins University and is passionate about writing that gets to the heart of the matter.
Johnson was reminded recently that ‘every conversation that is not directly about Capitalism is a conversation that abets Capitalism.’ This says something about his love for stories that explore mundane experiences, common suffering, everyday occurrences, and the miraculous joy of our human existence.
The following is an incomplete list of favorites and influences: Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, Don DeLillo’s Underworld, Denis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke, David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, the stories of Raymond Carver, the poetry of Kenneth Koch, and the thinking of Slavoj Zizek. Johnson has a soft spot for anything that imagines a way out of our current predicament, and has recently enjoyed reading Honor Moore’s A Termination, Thomas Pynchon’s Shadow Ticket, Sally Rooney’s Normal People, and former FTC Commissioner Alvaro Bedoya’s op-ed “How I Became a Populist” in The New Republic.
THOMAS JOHNSON 