Cheri Johnson is a writer based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Born in Salida, Colorado in 1976, she was raised in Lake of the Woods County in northern Minnesota, and has since spent time in North Dakota, Virginia, Massachusetts, North Carolina, and Texas. She has a BA in English from Augsburg College in Minneapolis, an MA in English and creative writing from Hollins University in Roanoke, VA, and an MFA in fiction from the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. She has published fiction, poetry, and reviews in magazines such as Clare, Pif, nidus, Touchstone, The Hollins Critic, Phantasmagoria, The Rio Grande Review, Glimmer Train, the Glimmer Train Bulletin, Pleiades, New South, and Puerto Del Sol.  In the fall of 2008 she had a story in The Emprise Review, whose editors nominated it for a Pushcart Prize. An excerpt from her novel-in-progress, Winter’s Charm, appeared under the title “In San Jacinto” in the November 2009 issue of Cerise Press: A Journal of Literature, Arts, & Culture.

Cheri’s first chapbook of poems, entitled Fun & Games, was released by Finishing Line Press on July 24, 2009, and is now available from the publisher and also on Amazon. Copies can also be ordered directly from Cheri by emailing her at cherijohnson33@gmail.com.

In 2004-2005, Cheri was a Loft Mentor Series Fellow at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis. She has won the John Engman Literary Prize at Augsburg College, the Andrew James Purdy Short Fiction Prize and The Gertrude Claytor Prize in poetry at Hollins University, and the Gesell Award in fiction, and an honorable mention in poetry, at the University of Minnesota. She has also won the Glimmer Train Stories Fiction Open (summer 2006), The Dorothy and Granville Hicks Residency in Literature at Yaddo (January 2007), a 2005 Bush Artist Fellowship, a 2007 Loft-McKnight Fellowship, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.  In the winter of 2007-2008, she was a fellow in fiction at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA. In the winter of 2008 she was a semi-finalist for the Iowa Short Fiction Award.

Currently Cheri works as a fiction reader at the literary magazine Our Stories, which offers writers feedback and suggestions on every story they submit.

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