Dr. Wayne Johns
Dr. Wayne Johns received a BA with a double major in English and Communication Arts from St. Andrews University, MFA from Georgia State University, and Ph.D from Florida State University. He has taught at large public universities, community colleges, and small private liberal arts church-affiliated colleges, and has worked as a tutor in university Writing Centers, a Cooperative Learning Lab for students with disabilities at GSU, and also as an advisor and instructor in the Multicultural Student Support Center at FSU.
While still in college, Dr. Johns interned at Image Film & Video Center/Atlanta Film Society and in the editing department on the Hollywood feature film adaptation of Billy Bathgate. Since then, he has taken courses in Multicultural Film Pedagogy at FSU, and in documentary video production; media copyright for documentarians; and digital publishing at Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies.
Dr. Johns has served as an editor for The Southeast Review, Anhinga Press, St. Andrews Press, and International Quarterly. His non-fiction and journalism have appeared in Yes! Weekly, The New New South, The Southern Quarterly, The Tallahassee Democrat, Raleigh Review, and the North Carolina Literary Review, among others; his work has been anthologized in Best New Poets, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, Like Thunder: American Poets Respond to Violence and American Diaspora: Poetry of Displacement (University of Iowa Press) and Don’t Leave Hungry: 50 Years of Southern Poetry Review (University of Arkansas Press). His fiction has been selected as runner-up for the Doris Betts Fiction Prize and the Bloom fiction chapbook award, and has appeared in Every True Pleasure: LGBTQ Tales of North Carolina (UNC Press) and Gaslight: Lambda Literary Emerging Voices Anthology.
His awards include the Exemplary Teacher Award, the Moore Professorship, Editors’ Choice Awards from Mid-American Review and Unicorn Press, Readers’ Choice Award from Prairie Schooner, James Applewhite Poetry Prize, Rane Arroyo Chapbook Award, Frank O’Hara Chapbook Award, and Honorable Mention for the 2019 Brockman-Campbell Award, given for the best book by a NC poet. A former Lambda Literary Fellow in Fiction, and Kingsbury Fellow at Florida State University, he is currently managing editor of EcoTheo Review.
