Alli Johnson from UCLA joins the UCSB Writing Program. Alli, who grew up in Moreno Valley near Riverside, double majored in English and History at UC Riverside and enrolled in the English Ph.D. program at UCLA after finishing her BA.

Upon finishing her dissertation in 2013, Alli worked as a lecturer at UCLA for three years teaching American literature. She also taught at Fullerton College and West LA College. Her essay, "Columbia and Her Sisters: Personifying the Civil War," was recently published in American Studies Journal. Her current book project examines bodies in U.S. Civil War print culture. Of the project she states that it is an "examination of how Americans--Northern and Southern, black and white, male and female, authorial and amateur--interacted with and represented the physial effects of war to create a literary record permeated by corporeality, suffering, and bodies that complicate antebellum notions of citizenship, personhood, and the nation."

Alli is not only an accomplished teacher and writer, she also appeared on Jeopardy!