Researcher · Educator · Writer · Web Developer
A working life in letters, scholarship, & code.
Jaymes W. Johnson studies the futures literature has already imagined—and builds quiet, exacting things for the web.
IThe Scholar
Reading the future by its oldest lights.
Jaymes W. Johnson took his degree in English at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where a childhood devotion to books hardened into a discipline. Named a Raab Writing Fellow in 2020, he works at the meeting point of African American, global, and speculative fiction—asking what Afrofuturism, cognitive narratology, and the literatures of empire can tell us about the climate century we have already entered.
His essays, poems, and research move between archives and imagined futures, with particular attention to voices the record was built to leave out. He has taught, led programs, and written for readers well outside the seminar room; he believes scholarship is a public art or it is nothing.
- African American literature
- Global & speculative fiction
- Afrofuturism
- Cognitive narratology
- Colonialism & empire
- Ecological & climate justice
EducationB.A. English, University of California, Santa BarbaraHonorsRaab Writing Fellow, 2020
IISelected Work
A bibliography, in progress.
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2020
A New Place: Essays and Poems
Written under the Raab Writing Fellowship, University of California, Santa Barbara—nonfiction and poetry on belonging, displacement, and the making of home.
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2020
“What We Lost in the Floods”
A research project on climate, memory, and displacement, advised by Prof. Chris McAuley, University of California, Santa Barbara.
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2019
The Climate Suite: Parts I & II
A poetry collection in two movements, written as the fires came closer.
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2004
“This Is the Night”
Semifinalist, Noreascon 4 Student Science Fiction & Fantasy Writing Contest—the earliest evidence on record.
IIIThe Writer
After dark, he writes as Jaymes Wade.
“The stars had been peculiar all week.”
Fiction is the laboratory. Under the pen name Jaymes Wade, Johnson writes speculative fiction rooted in inheritance, salt water, and the peculiar behavior of stars—alongside The Ephemeris, a newsletter of field notes, and The Artifact Room, a podcast about the objects stories leave behind.
Visit the Studio of Jaymes WadeIVThe Practice
Websites built the way essays are edited.
Johnson builds for people whose work deserves better than a template: authors, artists, small businesses, and institutions with something to say. No frameworks for their own sake, no page weight without purpose—typography first, performance always, and the reader’s patience treated as the scarce resource it is. Three studies from the bench:
VNotices
Kindly mentioned by—
- The CurrentUC Santa Barbara, 2019
- NoozhawkSanta Barbara, 2019
- Montecito Journal2020 & 2021