Christopher Johnston has been a freelance journalist and author since 1987.

Christopher Johnston has published more than 3,000 articles in numerous regional and national publications. These include American Theatre, Balanced Living, Christian Science Monitor, Cleveland Magazine, Continental, Crain’s Cleveland Business, Credit.com, The Plain Dealer, Progressive Architecture, Scientific American (online) and Time.com. He served as a contributing editor for Inside Business for six years and was a contributing editor for Cleveland Enterprise for ten years.

Currently, he is writing a book about the First Battalion, Ninth Marines, who suffered the highest loss rate in US Marine history at Khe Sanh during the Vietnam War. Johnston ghostwrote The Way I Saw It, the memoirs of the late Marc Wyse, co-founder of Wyse Advertising, which was published in 2013. 

For roughly 15 years, he wrote video scripts for the Multimedia Department at University Hospitals Case Medical Center, more than a dozen of which won Telly Awards. He also wrote two half-hour television programs for UH: "Gold Medal Medicine" about recent advances in orthopedic and sports medicine, which aired twice in October of 2005 on WKYC-TV3 in Cleveland, and "Vision of Hope: Winning the War on Cancer," which aired twice in September of 2006 on WKYC to more than 100,000 local viewers.

Additionally, he wrote a series of case studies about organizations that have used Appreciative Inquiry, an organizational development methodology pioneered by Professor David Cooperrider at Case Western Reserve University’s Weatherhead School of Management. Previously, he wrote company abstracts and profiled a number of socially responsible businesses to help Weatherhead launch its Business as an Agent of World Benefit website.

From 1991 to 1994, he worked with Frederick C. Crawford, the founding chairman of TRW Inc., on a variety of projects, including ghostwriting and editing four books about his life: Glimpses of Jimmy Doolittle (1994); Storyettes: Reminiscences of Frederick Coolidge Crawford, Vol. II (1994); Selected Speeches of Frederick Coolidge Crawford (1993); and Storyettes: Reminiscences of Frederick Coolidge Crawford (1992).

Johnston is also a playwright, and his play, Ghosts of War, about a Vietnam War veteran he had interviewed for five years, premiered at Dobama Theatre in Cleveland in January 2013. His plays have appeared at Cleveland Public Theatre (Sexually Explicit Material, The Mind Field, Theories of Relativity, The Mad Mask Maker of Maigh Eo), Dobama (My Body is Blue, Murder in Mind, Loud Americans: A Punk Saga), convergence-continuum (Selfies at the Clown Motel, APORKALYPSE!, Spawn of the Petrosexuals), and Talespinner Children’s Theatre (Finn McCool). Last Light was performed at the West 78th Street Theatre Lab in New York. He has directed for The Bang & The Clatter Theatre Co., Charenton Theatre Co., CPT, Dobama, IngenuityFest, and Karamu House. He completed his playwriting internship at the Cleveland Play House. 

Johnston teaches playwriting and creative nonfiction workshop courses at Cleveland State University. He holds a BA and MA in English from John Carroll University.

Christopher Johnston, Cleveland-based freelance writer since 1987.