“Mother’s Day of my dreams”: Sherrard native celebrates new book

Karli Johnson has been a mom since 2018, but this Mother’s Day Sunday is especially meaningful.

The spunky single mom, 33-year-old Sherrard native, Northern Illinois University alum, TEDx speaker, mental health activist, and victim advocate recently published “A Kids Book About Consent” ($24.99) with the award-winning Portland-based publishing company, A Kids Company About.

“Mother’s Day is hard for a lot of mothers — and not just single mothers, but working mothers and especially mothers in domestic violent relationships where they might still be with their partner,” Johnson (a survivor of domestic abuse and rape) said Friday in an interview with Local 4.

“That’s one thing of just the power of mothers in the community that I have found in other single moms and other parents,” she said. “This is the Mother’s Day of my dreams.”

A 2007 graduate of Sherrard High School, Johnson was a freshman at Northern Illinois in DeKalb on Feb. 14, 2008 during a mass shooting, when Steven Kazmierczak opened fire with a shotgun and three pistols in a crowd of students on campus, killing five students and injuring 17 more people, before fatally shooting himself.

One of her close friends was killed, and Johnson said she also was raped when she was in college.

“A lot of just trauma and things happen in college. So that’s when I kind of changed that narrative and my career path,” she said Friday, noting she graduated in 2011 with a communications degree with plans to go to grad school later on.

Johnson worked in marketing in the Chicago area, but didn’t like it.

“My boss was sexist. They were controlling, everyone hated their job,” she recalled. “I remember a very specific moment where we were picking models out for this panty hose line, and just the way they talked about these women and the things they said, and I was like this corporate life is not for me.”

She worked at a rape crisis center as a child specialist and educator, going into schools talking about child sexual abuse prevention and bullying prevention.

“I was passionate about that because I had lived through that in my high school and college years,” Johnson said, noting that’s when she started sharing her personal stories.

TED talk changes everything

“I started traveling all over the country speaking, working with companies, consulting with education programming,” she said. After she gave a TEDx talk at NIU in 2016, things “kind of blew up from there.”

Johnson ended up earning a master’s in education from Northern Illinois in 2017, plus graduate certificates in women in law and gender studies.

She was diagnosed with complex PTSD and ADHD. “It was from multiple traumas — from a shooting, from a sexual assault, from dating violence,” Johnson said.

She got married in 2017, her son Oliver was born in 2018, and Johnson got divorced in 2020 (they are on good terms and share custody). There was no physical violence in her marriage, but her ex-husband at times was verbally abusive, she said.

She moved to Peoria, to be within fairly close distance to both the QC (where her parents still live) and Chicago.

Johnson said she’s wanted to write a book for years, but didn’t want to self-publish. She admired the publisher, formerly called “A Kids Book About…” which is a series with many books in similar formats in addressing similarly tough, important issues (including racism, diversity, depression, body image, disabilities and activism).

“I just kept following them in the sense where I would buy the books for my son. And then finally, I was like, this would be perfect,” she recalled. “It’s just a ton of different authors with their specialized topics. And so I applied and I didn’t hear anything for a while and then, I got an email from them and this was months ago I got the email, that they’d like to work with me.”

“We started a conversation and hopped on a Zoom call and now a couple of months later, I’m a best seller on Amazon and it feels incredible,” Johnson said, noting when she speaks, she handles the hard topics with a fun, lighter touch.

As seen in her TEDx talk, Johnson uses humor, storytelling, and fun to discuss hard topics such as abuse, harassment, trauma, mental illness, and difficult communication.

Proud single mom, costume performer, former crisis advocate, and host of “Ask For It” podcast, Johnson worked with Illinois State Rep. Ann M. Williams on the 2019 consent education bill, requiring consent to be taught in Illinois schools’ sex education.

Johnson speaks to schools, organizations, and businesses all over the world.

Timed to raise awareness

Published in late March 2023, the consent book was timed to come out for April as Sexual Assault Awareness Month and Child Abuse Awareness Month.

The 66-page, simply written volume (with no photos or illustrations) is meant to address consent in all its forms, not simply in the physical realm.

“When people think about consent, they just think, can I kiss you? Can I hug you?” Johnson said. “It’s 66 pages, but the read time is like five minutes.”

The book is meant to teach kids how to be kind and courteous (in all social interactions), and ideally so when they get older, they will not become a victim or perpetrator of abuse.

“When I go into high schools and colleges and I talk to kids about this, I truly believe that my perpetrator, if someone would have stopped him and whispered in his ear and said, ‘Hey, wait, stop, you know, this is bad,” Johnson said. “You don’t know that this is rape, that this is gonna affect her for the rest of her life. That she is gonna have nightmares. She’s gonna struggle in relationships. She’s not gonna be able to drink those peach schnapps ever again.

“I truly believe that and again, this was over 10 years ago, so a lot of education has come a long way,” she said. “Even reading and grasping the concept of consent at a young age when there’s gonna be a sexual encounter with two people, the goal is for both of those people to understand that they have to get that freely given consent.”

Asking for and offering consent is a daily practice, the author says. Consent is a two-way conversation that always starts with a question. And it’s something you ask for, and grant or deny, every single time. In the book, you can learn what consent is and what it’s not, and even practice it yourself.

This new release in children safety books is aimed at kids ages 5+ with the following topics:

• Learning to ask for consent in daily situations
• Learning how to say no during an unwanted encounter
• Understanding different forces someone may use to get someone to say “yes” when they don’t want to
• Acceptance that it’s not their fault if someone doesn’t respect their “no”
• Recognize their safe adults and learn how to ask for help
• Practice asking for consent
• Practice saying “no”

“Illinois is a very great and progressive state where we’re teaching kids the things that I wish I would have known because I truly believe that if, if I was in the classroom with an educator like myself, that both myself and my perpetrator would have done things differently,” Johnson said. “When I do sexual abuse or sexual violence prevention, my major goal is to teach kids consent and to get them to understand, and adults because adults don’t get it either.”

She met her current partner on Bumble and said he saved her life because he noticed a lump on her left thigh that she delayed getting examined until early 2021.

A doctor thought it may be cancerous, but after the tumor was removed, it was found to be benign.

“The guy that saw that lump, he’s my current partner. We’ve been dating for almost two and a half years now. And so I jokingly say that Bumble literally saved my life,” Johnson said.

What’s the future hold?

Johnson recently got a full-time job in education and is a communications instructor (virtually) for Aurora University.

She doesn’t have any QC talks scheduled yet, but hopes to work with area schools, including returning to Sherrard.

“That would be so special to walk in the halls, to come there as an educator at the school that taught me how to read and write,” Johnson said.

She said Oliver (who will start kindergarten in the fall) is a perfect example of what teaching communication and consent at an early age looks like.

“Just the way he asks people for a hug or a high five,” his mom said. “I’ll just go in for a hug and he’ll be like mom, you didn’t ask for consent.”

Johnson said she was so glad to have a boy, to raise him to be a feminist.

“The way that boys are taught, that sex is a right instead of a privilege, needs to change. So the fact that my five-year-old son knows consent better than most adults is why I do this work and why I had a child and I am so proud of him.”

For more information on Johnson and her book, click HERE.