Maisha Z. Johnson is a Bay Area-based writer, blogger and creative facilitator. As a teaching artist and the founder of Inkblot Arts, a writing and editing support and group facilitation project, Maisha promotes literacy, healing, and positive change through artistic self-expression. She has an MFA in Poetry from Pacific University, where she got to work with some of her literary heroes including Kwame Dawes and Ellen Bass, and a BA in English with a Creative Writing emphasis from San Francisco State University. She also works as a creative facilitator with ArtCorps, providing training, coaching, and consulting to provide leaders and organizations with creative methods and skills to harness art and culture as tools for community development.

Maisha frequently performs and publishes her poetry, and through her writing, she shares her secrets for wrangling the obstacles of self-doubt and the impact of trauma. She also writes too many poems about her cat, and blogs regularly about the relationship between writing and social change.