Meet Johnna: From Community and classroom to colorado
Johnna Nicole Crawford became the youngest weekly newspaper publisher in Kansas when she created the first color publication in Haysville, Kansas, The Haysville Sun in February of 2007. Within three months the former newspaper, The Haysville Times, sold Crawford their assets and with the merger came the newer, brighter The Haysville Sun-Times, the legal publication for the City of Haysville, Kansas to this day.
Crawford began as a high school reporter for the Times her junior year of high school. She penned the Friday night football stories, town entertainment and the weekly Athlete of the Week which highlighted Haysville’s best Student-Athletes. Later, Crawford was trained in Adobe InDesign and took over as designer. She learned photography, Photoshop and was eventually handling advertising design, photojournalism and writing her own weekly opinion column about events in the town. By the time she split off to begin her own newspaper, Crawford had mastered every job including Editor and was ready to publish her own brighter publication, The Haysville Sun.
https://www.kansas.com/news/article987466.html
https://haysvillelibrary.wordpress.com/2010/02/01/library-friends-of-the-year/
After two years of publishing The Sun-Times, Crawford sold her newspaper to go back to school when she was accepted into Wichita State University’s Master of Fine Arts program for poetry. The program not only paid for her school but hired her as an English 101/102 Graduate Teacher for the three-year program. Crawford excelled at WSU winning a ‘Letter to the Future Contest’ in which her letter to the future was placed in the school’s time capsule to be opened again and read in 2077. She also won 2nd place from the American Academy of Poets contest for her poem, Say Awe.
While working on her poetry thesis Crawford began a research project the final year of her master’s which analyzed the writing of school shooters. Her project, “The WordPrint Project” won the People’s Choice Award at the Graduate Research and Special Projects Symposium and an invitation to explore her work further with $2000 and a summer class with Wichita State Ventures.
https://www.wichita.edu/about/wsunews/archive/?nid=3503
https://thechungreport.com/faces-entrepreneurs/
Through Wichita State Ventures Crawford won grants from the John A. See fund, and the Kansas JumpStart fund for Kansas entrepreneurs to explore her work as a functioning service. The final program created by Crawford is a computer program which encourages creative writing then analyzes the user’s language to identify individual characteristics specific to the user. The program will be beneficial to therapists, educators, businesses, parents or individuals in the future as it highlights personality differences quickly and efficiently.
https://www.wichita.edu/about/wsunews/news/2017/02-feb/2017_Jumpstart.php
Crawford maintains that writing and educating new writers in any form is still her main purpose and passion in life though she has relocated to Evergreen, CO. While helping her two children and husband Michael adjust to moving states Crawford is taking her time in determining her next moves. As a long time, journalist, educator and researcher Crawford is excited by the many opportunities in Colorado and hopes to find a position where she is not only needed, but can continue to grow in her world of writing. In 2015, Crawford penned a few stories on Medium.com which can be viewed below. She has numerous references for her experience and hopes she can find a place for her voice and passions in Colorado.
Johnna Nicole Crawford 
