Canadian
Jessica Johns is a Cree writer and member of the Sucker Creek First Nation in Treaty 8 territory, northern Alberta, who now lives in Edmonton. She holds a BA in English from Grant MacEwan University and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia. Her short story "Bad Cree" won the 2020 Journey Prize and became the basis for her debut novel of the same name, a horror story rooted in Cree family and land published in 2023 by HarperCollins Canada/Doubleday. The novel won the MacEwan Book of the Year and the Georges Bugnet Award for Fiction, received the American Library Association's Alex Award, was shortlisted for the Amazon Canada First Novel Award, and was selected for Canada Reads 2024. Johns is also a poet, author of the 2018 chapbook How Not to Spill, with short fiction published in several anthologies. Her work centers Indigenous women's relationships to grief, dreams, and ancestral land.