Book Talk and Signing: UCSB Alumna Maya Johnson

Sunday, November 17  2:00 PM

Chaucer’s Books hosts local author Maya Johnson for an in-store book talk and signing of her debut book Searching For a Black Writer.Joining the author in conversation is memoirist and UCSB professor Ellen O’Connell Whittet (What You Become in Flight).

Book Description

 “I think the other writers, always searching for their next story, looked at me–with my brown skin, bright orange hair and hot pink lipstick–and wanted to collect me. I was something peculiar to them. And I was more than happy to let them, if I got something in return.”

A school like UC Santa Barbara should be a paradise. It’s frat boys skipping class to surf three steps from their dorms. It’s day-long ragers and girls in bikinis on a Monday. In the party town of Isla Vista, college years are meant to be reckless, inebriated, and untouchable, and everyone is trying to be something they’re not. For Maya, a young black writer running from a life of sexual repression under her family’s religion, adulthood becomes an aimless journey through isolation and elitism in the deceiving glow of the Santa Barbara ocean. When death complicates all she knows about her family and herself, her search for self takes her up and down the coast of California, tracing through her lineage to align her past with her present. In Searching For a Black Writer, Johnson  connects ideas of tokenism and black excellence, motherhood and perfectionism, and family and spirituality to find her way home.

 About the Author

 Maya Johnson is an Afrofuturist storyteller and native Californian.  As a black, queer writer, she defines politics through interpersonal relationships, focusing on topics of generational trauma, romance, and identity.  A graduate of UC Santa Barbara’s Writing and Literature program, Maya has written for Locavore Lit LA, Laurel Moon, 45th Parallel, BULL,  and Beyond Thought.  A lover of fashion and botany, she searches for beauty in the perverse and unconventional.