Kim Johnson

Kim Johnson held office in social justice groups while still at school and in college, and went on to work in college administration. Her first novel, This Is My America, appeared from Random House Children's Books in July 2020. Tracy Beaumont, seventeen, writes weekly to an organisation called Innocence X on behalf of her father, a Black man held on death row in Texas for a crime he did not commit, with 267 days left before the date set for his death. Her brother Jamal, a track star, is then accused in the death of a white classmate and runs. It won the Pacific Northwest Book Award and the Malka Penn Award for Human Rights in Children's Literature, both in 2021, and the American Library Association placed it on its yearly best-fiction list for teen readers. Invisible Son followed in 2023 and The Color of a Lie, a historical thriller, in 2025.