Andrea Renee Johnson

‘“This girl is going places. I’m only afraid one day she’ll get there.” Since long before these words were spoken by one of her writing professors, Andrea Renee Johnson had been striking fear into the hearts of the few with her linguistic lingerings. “Writing is my real means of communication between the outside world and my inside one. Everything else I say is just pretty drivel.”

She started out illustriously, talking at 9 months, reciting poetry at 2 years old, reading by 3, on to classic novels, like Bram Stoker’s Dracula, by 6. She adored reading but loathed writing, until at 16 it found her, used her, made her its own. She began with the usual universal juxtapositions: love/hate, time/the end, beauty/ugliness, power/fear. As she came of age, she gradually unearthed her feminine identity through her writing, almost “a psychoanalytic process,” as she describes it.

Feeling the rise and fall of the female consciousness as surely as breathing, though her topics remained universal, her voice quickly moved from a crew of male and female protagonists to that of an extrapersonal introspective girl lover, undoubtedly informed by her own emerging lesbian identity. She fell in love with her muse and vowed to follow her to whatever painful end she might have in store.

It was then that she published several pieces in university literary magazines, and began to perform her works live, placing first in every spoken word competition she has ever entered. During this time, she also worked diligently as the editor of the literary and art magazine which she began at the university she attended “as a necessary outlet for emerging talents divergent in the Bible Belt” of Oklahoma.

From there, she has gone on to publish her poems in several other university literary magazines. However, she admits, either the performed or the written word can have their lacks when isolated. Thus, when she met Nic Cusworth in 2001, soaking up the culture in New Orleans, she saw new possibilities for her work. Now the many voices in her head have been unleashed in full force upon the world, at once, all tangled up in a noise that is clearest to the heart of the urban urge.’