Amanda Johnston

Amanda Johnston is a writer, artist, and the 2024 Texas State poet laureate. She earned an MFA in creative writing from the University of Southern Maine.

Johnston is the author of two chapbooks, GUAP and Lock & Key, and the full-length collection Another Way to Say Enter (Argus House Press, 2017). Her work has appeared in numerous online and print publications, including Callaloo, Poetry, The Moth, Puerto del Sol, Muzzle, and the anthologies Furious Flower: Seeding the Future of African American Poetry (Northwestern University Press, 2019), edited by Lauren K. Alleyne, and Women of Resistance: Poems for a New Feminism (OR Books, 2018), edited by Danielle Barnart and Iris Mahan.

Johnston has received fellowships, grants, and awards from Cave Canem, Hedgebrook, Tasajillo, the Kentucky Foundation for Women, The Watermill Center, American Short Fiction, and the Austin International Poetry Festival. She is a former board president of the Cave Canem Foundation and the founder and executive director of Torch Literary Arts.

In 2024, Johnston was appointed the poet laureate of Texas. In the same year, she received an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship.