Dr. Johnson is an Associate Professor of Language and Literacy for Linguistic and Racial Justice in the Department of English at Michigan State University. As a Black male scholar-activist, his classroom and research reflect the autobiographical. That is, his racialized, classed, and gendered -selves impact who he is as a scholar-activist—and, they cannot be detached. As a former student, who is a survivor of a racialized PreK-20 educational experience, he realizes he has delicate knowledge of how the traditional school curriculum reflects the identity and culture of white children while devaluing people who come from diverse racial, ethnic, and linguistic backgrounds. As such, his commitment to equity, justice, and inclusion extends through his research, teaching, service, and outreach. From his experiences teaching secondary English to his experiences in academia, justice has always been at the core. Moreover, Dr. Johnson is centrally concerned with equipping youth, post-secondary students, faculty and staff, and communities to embrace a radical imagination through (re)imagining the world, not as it currently is but what it has the potential to become. 

The contention of being a Black male educator in a world where Black lives are oftentimes mistreated, devalued, and silenced informs his theoretical, methodological, and pedagogical approaches and how he educates students and works in/through/against the academy. His scholarship explores the complex intersections of anti-Black racism, Blackness, language, literacy, and education and how the fields of language and literacy studies and English Education can become sites for racial justice. Dr. Johnson is an award-winning author. He was the recipient of the 2017 Promising Researcher Award, the recipient of the 2018 Edwin M. Hopkins Award, and the 2019 honorable mention for the Alan C. Purves Award all through the National Council of Teachers of English. His co-edited book, edited with Drs. Gloria Boutte, Gwenda Greene, and Dywanna Smith, African Diaspora Literacy: The Heart of Transformation in K-12 Schools and Teacher Education, is published with Lexington Books and received the 2019 Critics’ Choice Book Award for the American Educational Studies Association. His forthcoming book, Critical Race English Education: New Visions, New Possibilities, will be released in November 2021. Dr. Johnson’s work has appeared in numerous journals and books, including English Education, Journal of Literacy Research, English Journal, Research in the Teaching of English, Journal of Negro Education, The Urban Review, and Race Ethnicity and Education.