Join us on the PCC Campus for the following live events:
TONI ANN JOHNSON is the winner of the 2021 Flannery O’Connor Award for short fiction with her linked collection Light Skin Gone to Waste, released in October 2022. Roxane Gay selected the book for the prize and is its editor. Johnson’s novella Homegoing was a semi-finalist for the William Faulkner Wisdom Award in fiction. It won Accents Publishing’s inaugural novella contest in 2020 and was released in May of 2021. The novel Remedy For a Broken Angel was released in 2014 and earned Johnson a 2015 NAACP Image Award nomination for Outstanding Literary Work by a Debut Author.
In 1998 Johnson won the Christopher Award and the Humanitas Prize for her screenplay “Ruby Bridges,” the Disney/ABC movie and true story of the young girl who integrated into the New Orleans Public School system. In 2004 Johnson won a second Humanitas Prize for her screenplay “Crown Heights” (Showtime), also a true story. The film examined the relationship between a Hasidic Jewish teen and an African-American teen that came together to form a hip hop group in the wake of the 1991 Crown Heights Riots.
PCC’s Writer-in-Residence Program aims to enrich the cultural environment of the College and the larger community by bringing to campus for a period of three days a distinguished local writer to interact with students, faculty, staff, and community members.
Writer-in-Residence events include classroom visits, writing workshops, a faculty luncheon, and a public reading. Writers-in-Residence are interviewed by editors of PCC’s literary magazine Inscape, the interview to be published in the magazine. The residency also offers our visiting writer a wonderful opportunity to promote a recent publication.
The Writer-in-Residence Program is funded by the Pasadena Festival of Women Authors and by PCC's English and Language Studies Division.