Tim Barnes chats with novelist Micaiah Johnson about following through with her early passion for books and science fiction.

Micaiah Johnson is a Brooklyn-based author and scholar. She received her BA in creative writing from the University of California, Riverside, and her MFA in fiction from Rutgers-Camden. She received her doctorate at Vanderbilt university. On her mother’s side, she is a first-generation traditional high school graduate.

Her debut novel The Space Between Worlds won the Compton Crook Award and was an Editors’ Choice at The New York Times. NPR named it one of best books of 2020 and one of the best science fiction books of the last decade. Her follow-up novel, Those Beyond the Wall, an eerily timely looked at violence during apartheid, was released March 12th, 2024.

In her academic work she is concerned with questions at the intersection of race and technology, particularly as revealed in 19th Century America, a time punctuated by spectacular shifts in both. She also works in the necropolitical implications of preservation, both in centuries past and in our present moment of the Sixth Great Extinction.

Listen to episodes a week earlier than the rest by selecting a paid subscription to the newsletter!

Merch and more are coming soon at YouAreTheGenre.com

CREDITS:

Host: Tim Barnes

Guest: Micaiah Johnson

Theme Song: “You Are The Genre” by Freddie Nunez

Music Engineer: Adam Smith

Podcast Art: Madhuri Shukla