Melissa Johnson

Melissa Fite Johnson comes to Seabury in 2024 with eighteen years of high school teaching experience—the first twelve at her alma mater in Pittsburg, KS, and then six at Lawrence High School. Everything she’s heard about Seabury makes her feel like this is where she belongs. She’s especially excited about the small class sizes; over the course of her career, the smaller classes were the ones most likely to develop that elusive, almost magical chemistry where everyone feels comfortable being totally themselves. Melissa loves teaching high school. It’s such an important and meaningful time of life when people are actively figuring out who they are. She also loves English. Her Master’s is in literature and poetry, her poems have appeared in journals such as Ploughshares and Pleiades, and she’s the author of three poetry books. Melissa and her husband Marc (also a teacher, elementary special education with a focus on behavior) live with their three terribly behaved yet somehow perfect dogs. She loves walking through the Haskell-Baker Wetlands with her family, trying to catch every movie at Liberty Hall with Marc, and going to La Prima Tazza alone to write.