Johanna Stoberock

Johanna Stoberock is the author of the novels Pigs (Red Hen Press) and City of Ghosts (W.W. Norton). Her work has appeared in the Chicago Review of Books, Lit Hub, the Best of the Net Anthology, and elsewhere. A 2012 Jack Straw Fellow, 2013 Artist Trust GAP award recipient, and 2016 Runner Up for the Italo Calvino Prize for Fiction, Johanna has received residencies at the Corporation of Yaddo, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Millay Colony. A graduate of Wesleyan University and the University of Washington MFA program, Johanna worked in book and magazine publishing in New York before moving to Walla Walla fourteen years ago. While her fiction takes place in worlds of its own, her essays are often grounded in the landscape of Eastern Washington. She teaches in the Composition and First Year programs at Whitman College.

Johanna received a 2013 GAP to assist in the revison of her novella, Pigs. Pigs tells the story of four children stranded on an island that serves as the repository for all of the world’s garbage. The novella uses a dystopian island as a setting to explore questions about environmental responsibility, group action, and the possibility of innocence.