Johnny Townsend earned an MFA in fiction writing from Louisiana State University. He has three other degrees as well, including one in Biology. A native of New Orleans, Townsend relocated to Seattle after Hurricane Katrina. After attending a Baptist high school for four years as a teenager, he served as a Mormon missionary in Italy .... more
Johnny Townsend earned an MFA in fiction writing from Louisiana State University. He has three other degrees as well, including one in Biology. A native of New Orleans, Townsend relocated to Seattle after Hurricane Katrina. After attending a Baptist high school for four years as a teenager, he served as a Mormon missionary in Italy and then held positions in his local New Orleans ward as Second Counselor in the Elders Quorum, Ward Single Adult Representative, Stake Single Adult Chair, Sunday School Teacher, Stake Missionary, and Ward Membership Clerk. In the secular world, Townsend has worked as a book store clerk, a college English instructor, a bank teller, a loan processor, and a library associate. He has worked selling bus passes, installing insulation, surveying gas stations, and performing experiments on rat brains in a physiology lab. Townsend has published stories and essays in Newsday, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Salt Lake Tribune, The Army Times, The Humanist, The Progressive, Medical Reform, The Massachusetts Review, Glimmer Train, Sunstone, Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, in the anthologies Queer Fish, Off the Rocks, and In Our Lovely Deseret: Mormon Fictions. He helped edit Latter-Gay Saints, a collection of stories about gay Mormons, and he is the author of 36 books.
Most of those books are collections of Mormon short stories. The Abominable Gayman was named to Kirkus Reviews’ Best of 2011. Marginal Mormons was named to Kirkus Reviews’ Best of 2012. The Mormon Victorian Society was named to Kirkus Reviews’ Best of 2013. And Dragons of the Book of Mormon was named to Kirkus Reviews’ Best of 2014. Despots of Deseret and Missionaries Make the Best Companions were both named to Kirkus Reviews' Best of 2015. In addition to his Mormon stories, Townsend has written a collection of Jewish stories, The Golem of Rabbi Loew. He has also written one non-fiction book, Let the Faggots Burn: The UpStairs Lounge Fire, having interviewed survivors as well as friends and relatives of the 32 people who were killed when an arsonist set fire to a gay bar in the French Quarter of New Orleans on Gay Pride Day in 1973. He was an associate producer for the feature-length documentary Upstairs Inferno.
Townsend is married to Gary Tolman, another former Mormon, who also served as a missionary in Italy. They still speak Italian to each other every day.
