Photo Courtesy of Leah Trib Productions
Leah Johnson is in New York City the day after the last stop on her November 2024 book tour to promote Black Girl Power, an anthology of stories and poems celebrating Black girlhood, and the day before she will attend the National Book Awards, for which she served as one of last year’s judges. At 30 years old, Johnson is an accomplished author in the Young Adult fiction genre who understands the importance of self-promotion.
She’s good at it, too.
This book tour, not her first rodeo, has covered Los Angeles; Washington, D.C.; and Brooklyn. In every city, she included visits to schools in predominantly Black and brown communities, a nod to her young readership. Kids are a tough audience, though. “They keep you real,” says Johnson, whose newest work is described in its marketing material as “a vibrant, heartwarming collection,” an instant USA Today bestseller, and one of Kirkus Reviews’ Best of 2024. But two weeks after the 2024 presidential election, Johnson says this is not the Black Girl Power book tour she thought she would be making. “The world that I thought I was going to release a book called Black Girl Power into was a world where a Black girl had been elected president,” she says. “And so part of the job at that point is not just to promote the book, but to proliferate some sense of hope.”
Black Girl Power was published in November by Freedom Fire, an imprint under Disney Books focused on stories about the Black diaspora, primarily for middle-grade readers. The book features works by Amerie, Kalynn Bayron, Roseanne A. Brown, Elise Bryant, Dhonielle Clayton, Natasha Diaz, Sharon M. Draper, Sharon G. Flake, Kekla Magoon, Janae Marks, Tolá Okogwu, Karen Strong, Renée Watson, and Ibi Zoboi. It’s a follow-up to Johnson’s previous Middle School and Young Adult titles, including Ellie Engle Saves Herself, part of a series; 2021’s wildly popular Rise to the Sun; and the multiple award-winning You Should See Me in a Crown, whose main character, a Black bisexual high school student in a small Midwestern town, runs for prom queen to secure a scholarship for her dream college.
Writing about young people in the LGBTQ community is another way Johnson, who describes herself as a queer woman, connects with her readership and introduces them to strong, beautiful queer characters. It would have been nice if she had known a few of her own storylines when she was growing up on Indy’s west side, a Ben Davis High School student who was editor of the school newspaper and a member of the show choir and tennis team. “The experience of Black Midwestern girlhood is so specific,” she says. “Then, to add queerness into that mix, it’s like a very hyper-specific experience that I very rarely saw reflected in the stories that I read. Even now, there are so few of us writing from that position that it feels important for me to assert over and over that my relationship to my Blackness, to my queerness, is also in direct correlation to my life as a Hoosier.”
In 2023, Johnson turned her love for telling stories into a new chapter with Loudmouth Books, a 1,400-square-foot shop in Herron-Morton Place dedicated to amplifying underrepresented voices. (She has a soft spot for banned books in particular, one of her titles having once been labeled as “obscene content” and challenged by the Oklahoma Attorney General.) The place, bathed in sun and bright swaths of paint, is as colorful and vibrant as its owner—even though Johnson admits she knew little about running a bookstore when she took on the business. But two years in, Loudmouth has become more than a retail space. It’s a community hub, with shelves of curated titles and a calendar of events focused on diversity and creativity, and a place where everyone—especially folks like the ones Johnson writes about in her books—can see themselves on the shelves.
