Born in Richmond, Virginia, Plum spent her early years in Hong Kong and Singapore before her family immigrated to Canada, settling in Oakville, Ontario.
In 1983, she founded KidsCanada Publishing Corp. to pioneer the first parenting publications in Canada and was awarded the Toronto Sun’s Women On The Move Award for outstanding achievement in business. Over the next ten years, her flagship News Magazine, KidsToronto, won multiple international design awards and in 1992, Plum was awarded the PPA Award of Excellence for her monthly editorial column.
In addition to her writing and publishing, Plum is an accomplished illustrator and portrait painter, having long surpassed her goal of “ten thousand hours on the brush.” Over the past twenty-five years she has studied under Telford Fenton, Robert Markle, John Viljoen and Dan Hughes. She has also studied briefly under Susan Low-Beer, Maryon Kantaroff, Lila Lewis, and Mark Thurman, among others. In the summer of 2006, she traveled to England to study etching & printmaking under Freya Payne at the Falmouth College of Art.
Plum Johnson’s memoir, They Left Us Everything, is published by Penguin (Canada).