Amaud Jamaul Johnson was born and raised in Compton, California, and educated at Howard University and Cornell University. He is the author, most recently, of DARKTOWN FOLLIES: POEMS (Tupelo Press, 2013), and his collection, RED SUMMER, won the 2005 Dorset Prize from Tupelo Press. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University, his honors include fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Hurston/Wright Foundation, and Cave Canem. Johnson is an assistant professor of English in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.