Valentine Johnson is a fiction writer, teacher, and designer from Northeast Florida, a graduate of Florida State University, and a current MFA candidate at University of North Carolina Wilmington. They love to write speculative work set in the rural-ish American South, as well as realistic work that skews toward the absurd. Everything they write addresses the beauty, absurdity, and danger of being queer in this day and age. They are interested in the aesthetics of the body and of the dead—sex, ghosts, and cannibalism—and in juxtaposing the visceral trans body with the evocative landscape of their home state—syringes and pine needles, temperate rainforests and new body hair. They are currently querying a Southern Gothic coming-of-age novel tentatively titled SHADE ABOVE SHADE.