Acclaimed writer Toni Ann Johnson ’08 (Los Angeles, MFA) will release a new short story collection that asks a question many people spend a lifetime trying to answer: Where is home—and who gets to feel they truly belong there? But Where’s Home?, forthcoming from Screen Door Press in February 2026 (an imprint of the University Press of Kentucky), is the winner of the 2024 Screen Door Press Fiction Prize and marks Johnson’s latest milestone in an already celebrated career. The collection follows her award-winning Light Skin Gone to Waste, a 2023 NAACP Image Award nominee for Outstanding Literary Work and winner of the 2021 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction.
Known for her emotional precision, sharp humor, and unflinching honesty, Johnson uses But Where’s Home? to explore the complexities of Black life in America—confronting racism and classism alongside deeply personal themes such as narcissistic abuse and the fragile bonds between parents and children. The result is a collection that is both intimate and socially incisive, unafraid to name hard truths while still making room for tenderness and wit.
At the center of the book is the Arrington family—affluent, Black, and living in a postcard-pretty town where they are never allowed to forget they don’t quite belong. Told through interlocking stories and multiple perspectives spanning the 1960s through 2022, But Where’s Home? reveals how identity is shaped not only by the outside world, but by the private rules and tensions that govern life inside a family.
Sisters Livia and Maddie come of age under the influence of parents whose love is often conditional and whose behavior leaves lasting emotional scars. Their father, a respected psychologist, moves through the community with authority and charm while carrying on affairs with white women—choices that reverberate through the household and deepen old wounds. Their mother, raw with betrayal and volatility, fights to hold her family together while raising her daughters in a place that simultaneously rejects them and scrutinizes their place within it.
Across the collection, Johnson creates a chorus of voices that feels both specific and expansively human—stories that capture the contradictions of family loyalty, the quiet damage of manipulation, and the complicated ways people survive what they cannot control. But Where’s Home? becomes not only a portrait of one family, but a broader reflection on belonging, power, and the cost of being seen as “other,” even in the places you live and love.
Johnson is the author of Light Skin Gone to Waste, selected and edited by Roxane Gay, and shortlisted for the Saroyan Prize in addition to its NAACP Image Award nomination. Her novella Homegoing was a semifinalist for the William Faulkner Wisdom Award in Fiction and won Accents Publishing’s inaugural novella contest. Her novel Remedy for a Broken Angel earned an NAACP Image Award nomination for Outstanding Literary Work by a Debut Author. In addition to her literary work, Johnson is an award-winning screenwriter of historical dramas about race, earning the Humanitas Prize for projects including Ruby Bridges and Crown Heights.
Learn more about Johnson in the Common Thread profile “Antioch Alum Toni Ann Johnson Wins Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction” and by visiting Johnson’s website.
