Tenea was born in Kentucky. From it, she took the calm of the Ohio River and the swell of honesty (sometimes refreshing, sometimes catastrophic) that afflicts the folks born along its banks. Writing sustains her; music saves her. As often as possible, she straddles their borders to create compositions/fusions/hyphenated watchamacallit better heard than described.

So far the Knitting Factory, Dixon Place, The Public Theater, and others have opened their doors to the form.

Her work has appeared in Mothership: Tales of Afrofuturism, African Voices, Arise, Humanities in the South, Sycrorax’s Daughters, Contemporary American Women Poets, Shades of Blue and Gray, Whispers in the Night: Dark Dreams III and Necrologue, among others. She is the author of a poetry/short prose collection, Starting Friction as well as the novels, Smoketown, R/evolution and Evolution. Smoketown won the Parallax Award; R/evolution received an honorable mention the same year. In May 2020 Blueprints for Better Worlds was released as well as the social good site, buildabetter.world.

2021 saw the release of Frequencies: a Fiction Album and Broken Fevers of which Publisher’s Weekly wrote “the 14 hard-hitting, memorable short stories and prose vignettes in this powerhouse collection from Johnson … are astounding in their originality.”

No doubt she’s somewhere tinkering with an arts & empowerment enterprise or perhaps sitting in the sunshine.