The Snowdon family stands as a pinnacle of Black excellence in Washington, D.C.: educated, affluent, and influential. John Christopher, the patriarch, is revered by his medical students at Howard University. His wife, Camille, governs an elegant house overlooking Rock Creek Park and devotes herself to reading, gardening, and raising their three daughters—Cynthia, Patricia, and Eva.

Years later, when John Christopher’s granddaughter Johnnie comes to seek the truth about her own parentage, she unveils a legacy of unspeakable family secrets tangled up in America’s original sin. What begins as a quest for identity spirals into an apocalyptic vision of a nation on the brink of ruin.

By turns a poetic epic, a ghost story, a historical saga, and a chilling dystopian fable, Thereafter Johnnie is a unique, uniquely American, fusion of myth and reality: an erotic, horrifying, and even hopeful reckoning. Editor Jeremy Davies says, “It’s extremely ambitious. It takes in a whole bunch of registers and literary approaches, from biblical to classical to poetic to supernatural and science-fictiony.”

For the Washingtonian, Ike Allen says, “Enigmatic and fable-like, reviewers compared it to James Joyce’s take on Dublin,” and the New York Times wrote that it “belonged in the company of Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, and Gloria Naylor’s Linden Hills.”

Carolivia Herron is an African American Jewish author and scholar with her main interests in writing novels and children’s books, and teaching epic literature, African American studies, Classics, and multimedia storytelling. Currently she teaches Classics and English in the Howard University Department of Literature and Writing. She earned her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and M.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Pennsylvania.

Before coming to Howard, she held professorial positions at Harvard, Mount Holyoke, California State, Arizona State, and William and Mary. Herron’s scholarship includes the Oxford edition of the Selected Works of Angelina Weld Grimké, several essays on African American epic tradition, and the influence of John Milton on African American culture. She has several books in press (Kindergarten Blues, Grilled Cheese, seasongs, and Asenath and Our Song of Songs).

The play, Pharsalia; or, For Crying Out Loud, commissioned by Theater J is her most recent work. Pharsalia links Lucan’s ancient Roman epic of the same name, with Pharsalia Plantation in Virginia, where Carolivia’s formerly enslaved ancestors lived.

Her great-great-grandmother, Mary Ann Lumpkin, survived her enslaver and used his money to found Virginia Union University. The opera, Let Freedom Sing: The Story of Marian Anderson (Bruce Adolphe composer) with Carolivia’s libretto was originally produced by the Washington National Opera and the Washington Performing Arts Society. It was restaged in 2023 by Mobile Opera in Alabama. Carolivia also hosts a weekly radio show, Epic City, on Takoma Radio. In addition, she publishes works by Black Jews of Africa.

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