Linnea Johnson was born September 22, 1946.  She grew up Swedish in Chicago. She was married twice and gave birth to two children. Her best and longest relationship was with her life partner, Cheryl Long. She had many, many long-lasting friendships. She died April 20, 2013, and is greatly missed.

Linnea earned a BA and a PHD in English, and an MA in Writing and Women’s Studies.  She taught English literature and writing courses, Women’s courses, and American Studies courses during her decades of university and college teaching, in Nebraska, Illinois, and Pennsylvania. Linnea also privately mentored writers throughout her life.

Linnea was a published poet, essayist, and fiction writer. She authored full-length books of poems and several chapbooks; her poetry, essays, and fiction are published in literary periodicals and anthologies.  A reading of a cycle of poems in play form, Swedish Christmas, became a CD and a performance piece.

Linnea also was a watercolorist, photographer, and political activist. She is included in Barbara Love’s book, Feminists Who Changed America. She is ‘Lydia’ in Laura Kaplan’s book about the CWLU Abortion Counseling Service.

Linnea was part of “Jane,” the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union Abortion Counseling Service. She co-founded The Women’s Journal Advocate in Lincoln, Nebraska. She lobbied for open-records adoption reform, the passage of the ERA, and for other human rights initiatives. She co-hosted a Women in the Arts radio show and she was elected delegate to a White House Conference on the Family.

The above five paragraphs, though true, don’t give any real sense of the life Linnea lived or the hole left in the universe with her passing. Read her poetry and essays and plays and fiction, and look at her art, and you’ll begin to get a sense of her. We’ll add other material here, too, as time passes, and on the Memories page. But know this: Linnea Johnson was much loved.