Lizard Lounge Poetry Jam-Carol Johnson

$10

Carol Johnson is a poet of remembrance, resistance, and reclamation. Born into the lineage of Jamestown, an African American town founded by her fourth great-grandfather Ervin James in South Carolina, Carol carries the oral traditions of her ancestors with reverence and fire. Her poetry is both witness and offering, rooted in the rich soil of Black southern life and the enduring legacy of the African diaspora.Her debut poetry collection, O’Africa, threads together generations of oral wisdom, ancestral resilience, and sharecropper soil, birthing a tapestry of Pan-African memory, part poetry, part prose, that follows generations of the James family across time, memory, and place. Her poems aren’t linear; instead, they circle and spiral like gospel songs and griot tales—an embodied archive of survival, faith, and love. They remember. They reclaim. Spoken with the Sankofa bird perched on her shoulder, weaving memory, legacy, and lyricism into every line, Carol’s work loops backward to move forward, retrieving lost histories.Whether performing on stage or writing at her kitchen table, Carol invokes the sacred responsibility of the storyteller. Her work is especially resonant for those exploring identity, healing, and intergenerational legacy. It is a way of speaking truth and conjuring new futures from the bones of the past, creating space for what has been silenced, buried, or forgotten.

Host or Publisher Lizard Lounge