Kristin Johnson is an award-winning children's author. Her awards include: two Minnesota State Arts Board Artist Initiative grants (2013, 2015), two Loft Literary Center Shabo Awards for picture book writing (2007, 2011), and a Mystery Writers of America Helen McCloy Award for suspense writing (2007).
She has published several books for children and numerous poems and short pieces in various journals. She loves doing school visits, traveling, and spending time with her family.
The youngest of three children, Kristin Johnson was born in St. Paul, Minnesota in 1968. She graduated from Thomas Jefferson High Senior High School in Bloomington in 1986 and from Gustavus Adolphus College 1992 with a degree in Organizational Management.
After college, she got a job at Northland Insurance as a computer programmer trainee. She worked at Northland in various positions including marketing and web design for nearly 10 years.
In 2002, she did what everyone says you should not do: She quit her day job. She left Northland Insurance and the insurance industry, an industry built on risk aversion, to pursue a path that was all about taking risks. The new path would ensure rejection, have a high learning curve, and involve overcoming numerous obstacles. Her goal was to pursue writing and eventually become a successful author.
The same year she left corporate America, Johnson took her first writing course at The Loft Literary Center in downtown Minneapolis, Minnesota, where she completed her first draft of a suspense novel. Simultaneously, she started a master's program at Metropolitan State University and graduated with a Master's of Science in Technical Communication in 2005. After that, she supported herself by teaching writing at various local colleges.
Though Johnson started writing in the suspense genre, she realized that her true passion was in writing for children. The suspense writing, however, laid a foundation for future success as a novelist because as Johnson says, "All writing should be suspenseful." She hates hearing people say of a novel: When you get past the first 100 pages, it gets really good. Johnson believes a story should be good from page one.
