Listen to Black American screenwriter and novelist Toni Ann Johnson — from upstate New York and a long-time resident of Los Angeles, California — share about working and living during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Toni Ann shares:
“I am technically mixed. So I have as much white European blood as Black, but I don't identify as a mixed race person. Although I look like a mixed race person. I identify as African American. I grew up in an all-white area where I was routinely called the N-word, and so I’m Black, and I now live in a mostly Black, but also some Latinx area, and it's gentrifying, so there's white people here too. But, when I bought my house, it was mostly Black and Latinx.”
“So in 2020 I was teaching at USC…I had two classes a week. So, I was going to campus, which I don't live that far from USC. It's like 6 miles. But, I was on campus and then I didn't know what Zoom was, but like all of a sudden it was like ‘Okay, this Wednesday we're gonna teach on Zoom,’ and I was like, ‘What is Zoom?’ and I had to learn that really fast…”
Toni Ann talks about winning the Flannery O’Connor Award for her linked story collection “Light Skin Gone to Waste,” forthcoming from UGA Press in the fall of 2022.
