One day more than 50 years ago, Carolivia Herron was stepping onto the curb at Piney Branch Road and Underwood Street, Northwest, when she was struck by a vision: a striking woman on the sidewalk, silhouetted by the sky, her hand raised in a gesture of repudiation. “It was like, ‘Oh, wow, who is she? I’ve got to know her story,’ ” Herron says. The woman was imaginary, but powerful enough to start Herron’s wheels spinning. When she got home, she began to write.

Herron, a classics lecturer at Howard University, tells this story while sitting at a coffee shop in the same neighborhood, where we’ve met up to discuss the resulting dystopian novel, Thereafter Johnnie , which is about, among other things, the character based on that woman and her daughter. First published 34 years ago by Random

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