J. Ivanel (Julie) Johnson

J. Ivanel Johnson (pen name) is a disabled author/poet/playwright currently living in New Brunswick. She is a former actress/director and Music/Theatre-arts & English teacher in England, Scotland, Stratford, Ontario and across the western USA. She has seen two of her original shows produced at the Am/Dram level. Published in Canada and the USA as a poet in the 1970s and 1980s, as a journalist and song-writer in the Ottawa Valley throughout the 1990s and 2000s, and as the commissioned author of How To Teach Drama to Kids (HowExpertPress,in 2013, re-released in hardcover in 2020), her most recent published works include a creative memoir short story in Renaissance Press' Aurora Award-nominated Nothing Without Us anthology, (currently part of the required syllabus at Trent University) as well as short stories, plays and poetry in other anthologies. Her debut novel, out by BlackRose (Castroville), will be released Sept. 2022. In 2018, Johnson also ran a successful Kickstarter campaign for funding one of her film treatments, which she has now passed on to two talented film-makers in the USA. While Johnson has lived in many regions of the U.K., and North America, she presently resides near the Scottish settlement of Perth-Andover, New Brunswick where her new full-length, historical and "wholly-Canadian" musical, Rough Notes, is partly set. In 2022, Canada Council for the Arts awarded her with a grant to professionally workshop the musical, set to be presented at the end of October 2022 at Second Wind Music Centre in Florenceville-Bristol, NB. More may be found on the Canadian Musical Theatre Database.