Take our word for it: Johnson is a superstar with staying power. “I mean, it’s in Publishers Weekly, so I’m gonna take their word for it. “It feels very fresh-I’m not convinced it’s real,” says Johnson, 26, who spoke with me by phone the next day from her family’s home in Indiana, where she returned to ride out the pandemic. The announcement was made the same day her seven-figure two-book deal with Disney/Hyperion, for a middle-grade series based on a “superhero origin story in the tone of the Baby-Sitters Club,” was named Deal of the Week by Publishers Weekly. Seven months later, the novel earned Johnson her first Lambda Literary Award nomination for excellence in LGBTQ+ YA fiction. Her debut novel, You Should See Me in a Crown, featuring ingenious would-be prom queen Liz Lighty, turned out to be the kind of book that draws a crowd: “The queer prom romance you didn’t know you needed,” as Kirkus called it in a starred review, became the inaugural YA pick for Reese’s Book Club in August 2020. In the surreal swirl of a pandemic year, Leah Johnson became a bestselling author.
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