Alaya Dawn Johnson is the author of the YA fantasy Racing the Dark (Agate Bolden, 2007), the first in The Spirit Binders trilogy. The second installment, The Burning City, is forthcoming in June 2010. She has published a middle-grade adventure, The Goblin King (Lerner/Graphic Universe, 2009). She is also the author of an (adult) historical urban fantasy series, the first installment of which is called Moonshine (Thomas Dunne/St. Martin's Press, May 2010). Her short fiction has appeared in Fantasy Magazine, Interzone, and Strange Horizons, Interfictions 2 and been reprinted in Year's Best SF 11 and Year's Best Fantasy 6. Her story "Shard of Glass" was a finalist for the Carl Brandon Society Parallax Award (2006).

She lives in New York City, where she eats vegetarian Indian food and haunts coffee shops with her writing group, Altered Fluid.