Christopher is an independent journalist and has published more than 4,000 articles in numerous regional and national publications including American Theatre, Christian Science Monitor, Cosmopolitan, History Magazine, Reasons to be Cheerful, Scientific American, The Daily Beast and Time.com. He is also a playwright and director and has had more than 25 of his plays produced.

 

Currently, he is working on a book about a sex trafficking survivor leader in California who specializes in helping children who have been exploited recover, as well as developing a couple new investigative pieces about human trafficking cases. His article about how the impacts of domestic abuse can lead to dementia and Alzheimer’s disease will appear in Being Patient later this year. His new play Death Cruise 2020 about people stuck on a cruise ship during the pandemic will be produced at convergence-continuum theatre in Tremont in 2025.

 

Johnston’s book, Shattering Silences: Strategies to Prevent Sexual Assault, Heal Survivors, and Bring Assailants to Justice, was published by Skyhorse Publishers in May 2018. 

 

Inspired by his father and uncle who served in WWII, Johnston frequently writes about veterans. He spent a decade interviewing veterans of the First Battalion, Ninth Marines, who suffered the highest loss rate in U.S. Marine history at Khe Sanh, to write the docudrama Ghosts of War, which was produced at Dobama Theatre in 2013. He is currently working with a highly decorated Green Beret who was severely wounded during a mission in Afghanistan to write about his combat experiences and finding innovative ways to heal through Post-Traumatic Growth.

 

In August, he received an ASJA 2024 Honorable Mention award for a health article. In 2020, Johnston received an Ohio Society of Professional Journalists award for best investigative reporting for a digital publication. In 2018 and 2019, he received an Ohio Arts Council grant and a Dramatists Guild Foundation Writer’s Alliance Grant for his play about sex trafficking, Live Bodies for Sale. In 2019, he received the Distinguished Professional Contribution Award from The Renee Jones Empowerment Center in Cleveland that provides a full spectrum of services to help women survivors of human trafficking recover.

 

Johnston is a member of the American Society of Journalists and Authors (ASJA) and currently serves on the Board and the Diversity, Inclusion, Accessibility and Inclusion Task Force. Additionally, he occasionally teaches playwriting and creative nonfiction courses at Cleveland State University, solutions journalism at Ursuline College, and a variety of writing workshops for the William M. Skirball Writers Center at the Cuyahoga County Public Library’s South Euclid-Lyndhurst Branch and for Literary Cleveland. 

 

He earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English at John Carroll University.