Corey Johnson

My name is Corey Johnson, I’m currently an online business student and a full-time Youth Prevention Specialist. Poetry isn’t a professional activity for me, but moreso a creative outlet that I use to release my thoughts and emotions! I’ve been writing short form and slam poems in a small journal since I was 15, most of which include drawings or formatting that help emphasize the feelings I want to display in my poetry.

I began reading slam poetry in my junior year of highschool in St. Louis, Missouri on a poetry team called “Slam Cats”. I’ve faced plenty of adversity in my life: being a Black Queer person growing up in a White & Christian household, going through self harm, and dealing with addiction in my family. I wanted to share what I was going through so that I was no longer alone. Doing this helped me realize that sharing my life’s experiences was helping other people share their stories as marginalized people, and not just black queer stories. Years after reading poetry competitively, I wanted to invoke the feeling of slam poetry on paper, which is when I began digitalizing my poetry journal to one day share as a book of its own.