Rebecca O. Johnson

I am a writer and activist. After working most of  my life organizing
with low-income communities, it became apparent to me that it was time to take my thoughts out of the closet and into the world. 

      I am occupied with the environments we traverse in our life journeys, the ecologies that feed us (and deplete us) and that are generally not of our choosing.  They span time, personalities, geographies.  These ecosystems are sometimes hidden but more frequently await our conscious engagement with them. 

    One such environment that is currently the focus of much of my writing is the landscape of dispossession. I find this dispossession etched in the very geography of this country  --from urban sidewalk murder memorials for youth of color gunned down in the neighborhoods to lonely bridges in west Tennessee that mark particularly gruesome deaths to the great floods (whether 1927 or 2004) that have displaced so many of my people. Of particular interest are the lives of ordinary colored men born at or near the turn of the twentieth century.  Their experiences are certainly important to our national identity, but even more significant in the ways they are inscribed on the hearts of those of us who grew up with these men as fathers, uncles, brothers, and friends.

Urban Ecology is my occasional web journal.  Read social commentary, punk economic analysis and literary en

fforts from an afro-lesbo-buddhist-feminist perspective.  Now that's a mouthful.

 Earth Day Lowell Lecture at Boston University, April 22, 2009

 William Means of the American Indian Movement is the keynote and I am respondent!  Come on out to 

Boston University

Sherman Student Union

775 Commonwealth Ave.

Boston, MA 

 7-9 p.m.

Recent Publications and Works in Print

  A Brief History of My Nappy Head appears in the anthology Submerged: Tales From The Basin.  Join me for a reading and learn more about this very special volume Sept. 15, 2008 at CUNY in New York City.

Lonesome Refugees, a reflection on floods, the blues and Hurricane Katrina is in the most recent edition of Callaloo A Journal of African Diaspora Arts and Letters

One of the most surprising things to me, as a writer, is how some works get legs, even if the author knows nothing about it.  My piece, New Moon Over Roxbury, is apparently being taught in a couple places and has garnered me an invitation to speak at an Earth Day Event at Boston University.  New Moon first appeared in Ecofeminism and the Sacred, Carol Adams, ed; and most recently (as far as I know) been reprinted in City Wild, Terrell Dixon, ed.

 Here's an interview I did  with Octavia Butler back in 1994.  It appeared in Sojourner: The Women's Forum (of happy memory).