About Yvette

Yvette Johnson is the Executive Director of The Booker Wright Project. She is also an accomplished filmmaker, writer, blogger, workshop facilitator, and public speaker.  She co-produced the feature-length documentary film Booker’s Place: A Mississippi Story, which had its 2012 world premiere in New York City at the internationally-recognized Tribeca Film Festival.  Not only did the film open to rave reviews, it was also the recipient of numerous awards including the 2013 International Cinema in Industry: Documentary Gold Award, the 2013 FOCAL International Award for Best Use of Footage in a Factual Production, and the 34^th Annual Telly Silver Award for Social Issues. 

Ms. Johnson’s work on the film and her personal connection to it were featured in a one-page spread in the New York Times, an hour-long Dateline report, an article in the UK’s Daily Mail, a segment on NPR, and interviews on Democracy Now, Arizona Horizons, The Morning Scramble and several others. 

In 2007, long before her work as a filmmaker and public speaker began, Ms. Johnson blogged about the challenges she faced raising her two African American sons, her efforts to better understand race relations, bias, class, privilege, and the walls that continually divide our nation generation after generation. 

Her blog, The Booker Wright Project, turned into a space that documented her personal journey and highlighted her passion for language, words, and mutual understanding of difference.  Over the years, Ms. Johnson has continued to blog about current events, her family, and her questions about bias in America, and in 2013, one of the world’s largest publishing companies, Simon and Schuster, purchased publishing rights to her story.  Ms. Johnson’s widely anticipated book about her upbringing, the town that first coveted, then eventually crushed her family, and of course, her grandfather, Booker Wright’s brave and defiant legacy will be published in late 2016 or early 2017.

In her role as the Director of The Booker Wright Project, Ms. Johnson has spoken extensively to different groups about the importance of rediscovering our shared humanity, the freedom that comes with recognizing our unconscious biases, and why it’s so dangerous to vilify those who once stood on the wrong side of history.  Ms. Johnson’s public speaking clients include The Smithsonian Anacostia Museum, Wells Fargo Bank, the Anti-Defamation League, the Clinton School of Public Service at the University of Arkansas, New York University, University of Alaska at Anchorage, and the Wisconsin African-American Women’s Association, to name a few. 

In 2014, Ms. Johnson and Dr. Neal Lester, Director of ASU Project Humanities (http://humanities.asu.edu/), created a workshop series that addresses privilege and bias with diverse audiences, in varying communities: http://humanities.asu.edu/perils-perks-privilege.  Together, they worked with the Tempe Police Department during the summer of 2015 to train more than 400 employees on how to better understand their own biases, how those biases might be affecting their jobs, and the reality of systemic biases.