Lynn-Steven Johanson – Novelist / Playwright

Lynn-Steven Johanson is a novelist and an award-winning playwright whose plays have been produced on four continents. He holds a Master of Fine Arts degree in Directing from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and is retired from Western Illinois University in Macomb where he has lived in with his wife since 1989.

He has worked with Edward Albee at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago and has directed over fifty productions in theatres and universities throughout the Midwest. In 1996, he began redefining himself as a playwright, and he has been writing plays ever since.

Lynn is a past president of the Mid-America Theatre Conference and initiated its Playwriting Symposium, a member of the Dramatists Guild of America, Chicago Dramatists, and the Playwrights of Minneapolis. His plays have won the Snowdance Comedy Festival, the Nantucket Short Play Festival, the Pend Oreille Playhouse One-act Play Festival, the Old Opera House Theatre’s New Voices Play Festival, and the East Valley Children’s Theatre Playwriting Contest, and he is a recipient of an AriZoni Theatre Award of Excellencefor Best Original Play and the Best Script Award from the Copenhagen Theatre Circle Fringe Festival. His plays have been produced by the Turnip Theatre, American Globe Theatre, Makor Theatre, the Short Play Lab, Senses Askew, Love Creek Productions in New York, the City Playhouse, the Attic Theatre, CAST Players, and First Stage in Los Angeles; and numerous other theatres throughout the United States as well as the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, India, Denmark, and the Kingdom of Bahrain.

Johanson also began writing novels when his wife suggested adapting one of his screenplays into a long-form work of fiction. The result was Rose’s Thorn, which became the first in his Joe Erickson Mystery series. It was published in 2020 by Level Best Books.

The books follow Detective Joe Erickson as he investigates homicides for the Chicago Police Department. Known for his razor-sharp intuition, keen investigative skills, and the occasional use of unorthodox methods, he works to solve murders, often with little or no evidence to go on.