Jim Johnson, a former Duluth Poet Laureate, lived most of his life in Northern Minnesota where he developed an awareness and concern for local culture and history, as well as for the natural world. He has published ten books of poetry and now lives in Cedar Falls, Iowa, and Isabella, Minnesota.

His previous collections include Text For Our Nomadic Future (Red Dragonfly Press, 2018), Yoik (Red Dragonfly Press, 2015), The First Day Of Spring In Northern Minnesota (Red Dragonfly Press, 2012), which won a Northeast Minnesota Book Award and was a finalist for a Minnesota Book Award, and Driving Gravel Roads (Red Dragonfly Press, 2009, a collection of fifty prose poems.

In Selected Poems: One Morning In June he acknowledges the interconnectedness of our species and plants and animals. In these time of climate change, extinction of species, and increasing catastrophes, we must not ignore the community of plants and animals, as their survival is essential to our own.