DeAnna Tisdale Johnson is the Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of the Jackson Advocate newspaper. Johnson joins a short list as one of the youngest publishers in the history of Black newspapers.
Johnson oversees a small staff and is diligently working to grow the newspaper to its former glory and beyond by digitizing the medium. She has been a published writer since the age of fourteen for the publication, where her father Charles Tisdale was owner and publisher until his death. Her mother, Alice Tisdale, is now publisher emeritus.
She is also a lyric soprano, lauded for her warmth and richness of voice. Her performances include a concert as the premier vocalist with the Mississippi Symphony Orchestra, Anna Maurant in Kurt Weill’s Street Scene, with lyrics by Langston Hughes; chorus and Prilepa (cover) in Tchaikovsky’s Queen of Spades with Harvard’s Lowell House Opera; Foreign Princess from Dvorak’s Rusalka (Halifax Summer Opera Festival); Forester’s Wife and Fox (cover) in Janacek’s The Cunning Little Vixen, among other roles…