Juleen Eun Sun Johnson was born in Seoul, South Korea. Johnson was adopted and taken to Valdez, Alaska, where she spent her formative years. Johnson has been published in Cirque: A Literary Journal, Nervous Breakdown, The Rio Grande Review, Apeiron Review, The Round, Whiskey Island Magazine, Dunes Review, and other journals. She attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop Summer sessions. During this time, Johnson studied with Professor James Galvin and Mark Leidner.
While Johnson was at MacDowell she worked on poems about being adopted. The week before Johnson was to attend MacDowell, her 100 year-old grandmother died. This brought death, loss, and other loved ones who have passed to the forefront of her thought, so many of the poems are about loss, both in the adopted sense of loss and the from of death. After Johnson left MacDowell she wrote about the loss she experienced when she left. When she began her journey at MacDowell she opened her Steinway grand piano in her studio and wrote a song, maybe to take the tension off and to break in the space. She wrote poetry for a month and on her last day she woke up at 6 a.m. to visit her studio one last time. During this visit she wrote a song on the piano to release her spirit.
