Alaya Dawn Johnson

1 universe Last reviewed 2026-08-18

Alaya Dawn Johnson was born in 1982 in Washington, D.C. She earned a BA in East Asian Languages and Cultures from Columbia University (2004) and later a master's degree in Mesoamerican studies from the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, focusing her research on fermented food and its ritual symbolism in pre-Columbian Mexico. Active as a speculative fiction writer since 2007, she works across science fiction, fantasy, and solarpunk, and relocated from New York City to Mexico City in 2014. Her young adult debut, The Summer Prince (2013), depicts a post-apocalyptic, cyberpunk-inflected Brazilian arcology ruled by a nanotech-empowered matriarchy, and was longlisted for the National Book Award; its follow-up, Love Is the Drug (2014), follows a prep-school student in a dystopian Washington, D.C., and won the Andre Norton Award in 2015. She has also written urban fantasy featuring vampires in 1920s New York and fantasy set in islands inspired by Polynesian culture. Her novel Trouble the Saints won the World Fantasy Award in 2021, and her novelette 'A Guide to the Fruits of Hawai'i' won the Nebula Award in 2015. She served as a guest of honor at the Life, the Universe, & Everything symposium in 2021, and is recognized as one of the more genre-crossing voices in contemporary speculative fiction, blending historical, dystopian, and mythic material.

Universe(s)

Books

• Trouble the Saints (2020) · Trouble the Saints Core Canon

Aggregate across all universes

• Total Core Canon books across all universes: 1 book
• Award recognitions across all universes: 1 (1 won)

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