Nancy Johnson

Nancy Johnson brings a television reporting background to fiction about race, class, work, and the obligations people carry toward family and community. She spent more than a decade reporting for CBS and ABC affiliates before moving into brand journalism and literary writing. William Morrow published her debut, The Kindest Lie, in 2021. Set during the early Obama presidency, the novel follows Ruth Tuttle, a Black engineer who returns to the Indiana town where she grew up after learning that her husband wants to start a family. Her search for the son she relinquished as a teenager brings her into contact with Midnight, a white boy confronting economic instability and loss. Johnson uses their meeting to connect personal secrecy with the decline of a manufacturing town and with difficult questions about belonging. The book was selected as a New York Times Editors’ Choice. Her later novel People of Means continues her interest in Black family histories across generations, while The Kindest Lie established her voice in carefully observed American social fiction.