Varian Johnson was a self-described high school geek who played in the marching band, participated in the school academic challenge team, and someone who considered his Hewlett Packard calculator a prized possession. After graduating co-valedictorian with his twin brother, he went on to pursue a civil engineering degree at The University of Oklahoma. Johnson’s love of writing began in elementary school, but he made his first serious attempt at writing a novel while still in college publishing Red Polka Dot in a World Full of Plaid in 2005. He subsequently wrote two other young adult novels, My Life as a Rhombus and Saving Maddie. Johnson truly found his writer voice after studying and earning his MFA in children’s writing at Vermont College of Fine Arts.

While pursuing his degree, he studied The Westing Game, a favorite novel from his childhood that involved a complex puzzle of a plot. Using this as his inspiration and drawing on his love of heist movies like James Bond and Ocean’s Eleven, he began work on The Great Green Heist his first work of middle-grade fiction. Having never seen a heist film or novel that featured a person of color as the hero, Johnson set out to fill his story with a diverse cast of characters.