Amy Johnson is a writer shaped by language, travel, and a lifelong devotion to storytelling.
Fluent in Russian after having lived for four years in Moscow, she has also lived in England, Croatia, and Turkey—experiences that continue to influence her imagination and sense of place.
She is particularly inspired by diverse and underrepresented voices, and she believes that literature is most powerful when it broadens who gets to speak and be heard.
Drawn to dystopian and fantasy fiction, she loves how speculative worlds can illuminate urgent truths about our own.
When she’s not writing, Amy enjoys getting lost in indie bookstores, visiting vineyards with her wife, and spoiling their chihuahua, Minnie.
We Who Exist
Over the course of two weeks, Lily Winters loses her mother and grandparents to an unknown bacterium while visiting her family in Russia. As the death toll climbs, borders slam shut and never reopen, and suspicion of outsiders hardens into law. Ten years later, noncitizens are imprisoned, women are stripped of hard-won rights, and cities are sealed behind towering Walls. Lily is a Runner, smuggling women beyond the Moscow City Wall, and she lives by one rule: avoid the Watchers. Read More…
On a routine run, Lily is caught by Watcher Serafima Stepanova. In an attempt to atone for the sins of her past, Serafima smuggles herself and Lily across the border, fleeing Russia for the one country rumored to be freer: the United States.
Initially an unwilling participant in their escape, Lily’s goal soon becomes finding her father and brother in New York City. But the United States is not the same country she left behind ten years ago. As Lily navigates this new world and an uneasy alliance with Serafima deepens into something neither expected, Lily must decide whether reaching her family is worth braving the country she no longer recognizes and trusting the one woman she swore she never would.
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