Bret Anthony Johnston is the author of the internationally acclaimed Corpus Christi: Stories (Random House, 2004). Named a Best Book of the Year by The Independent of London and The Irish Times, the collection has received the Southern Review's Annual Short Fiction Award, the Glasgow Prize for Emerging Writers, the Texas Institute of Letters' Debut Fiction Award, the Christopher Isherwood Prize, the James Michener Fellowship, and was shortlisted for Ireland's Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, "the richest short story prize in the world."

His work appears in magazines such as Esquire, The Paris Review, Oxford American, and Tin House, and in anthologies such as New Stories from the South: The Year's Best 2003, 2004, 2005, 2008, and 2010, Best American Short Stories, and Prize Stories: the O. Henry Awards. He is a graduate of Miami University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship. He has written essays for The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times, Slate.com and NPR's All Things Considered, and he’s been a skateboarder for almost twenty years.

In 2006, the National Book Foundation honored him with a National Book Award for writers under 35.

Currently, he is Director of Creative Writing at Harvard University.