Black pop culture isn’t unfamiliar territory for Tre Johnson, who in 2017 started writing about topics such as Prince, Beyoncé and the movie “Black Panther.”

That continued for a few years — until he realized something was missing.

With that kind of writing, Johnson, 48, couldn’t tell stories of the everyday brilliance of Black people making it work in America. Those he witnessed in Black homes in cities including Philadelphia, Washington and Camden, New Jersey, while working in education.

“I started building up this body of work that was just like, damn, we are missing out. So much of what also makes us brilliant is not just these treetops of the Beyoncés and these talented tenth kind of folks. This is about the everyday people, two feet on the ground,” said Johnson, a University of Maryland, College Park, alumnus.

His debut book of essays, “Black Genius,” examines the love and brilliance of Black people in America.

“I do want people to consider and reconsider: To what extent are we kind of programmed to leave out, or not consider, different types of Black brilliance in everyday life?”

Ahead of his upcoming Banner Book Club appearance Tuesday at 6 p.m., Johnson talked with us about his writing, distinguishing between Black genius and Black excellence and more. This conversation has been lightly edited.

I’m sure this question comes up a lot, but I have to ask: What’s the difference between Black genius and Black excellence?

Yeah, it does come up a lot. I feel like Black excellence speaks more to a capitalistic mindset. My feeling and my pet theory about Black excellence is that it is about the ways in which we separate ourselves from the rest of the pack. I think Black excellence, kind of born out of the Obama era, which is well intentioned about, like, “hey, look, look at how great we really are and how great we really can be.” But it also became co-opted, I think, to be much more about material wealth and about the commodification of a lot of culture that was about care and community in a way that’s become distorted.

Black genius, I think, is about the mundanity of what it means to be a part of a communal collective of brilliance that pulls off the unimaginable and amazing every day.

So that does not require Grammy nominations or living at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

How has the book been received in the Black community?

It’s been nothing but a love tour. [What] I keep hearing from people is, like, folks want to have this conversation. People in particular want to have this conversation in community with each other. It seems like the book has kind of helped to re-instill [in] people the importance of third and communal spaces to have conversations in general about Black cultural life.

Something I didn’t foresee when I was writing a book, but it’s come up a couple times, is some folks feel like there’s a hidden narrative about leaving out the Black church. And it honestly did not occur to me, probably because I am not a particularly churchgoing person myself but reared in a religious background.

But ... I think a lot of our Black churches are the blueprint, or share a similar blueprint, to a lot of what I’m talking about in the book.

What did writing this book do for you personally?

It was healing. It felt very validating. It’s my first book, and so I think it helped me really have love and compassion for myself. I think I’d been in so many professional and social environments where I thought so much of the messaging was about that I wasn’t enough, and that the intellect and the cultural disposition I had was often feeling challenged to the way of feeling disparaging. And I think I saw how I shared so many experiences with so many other Black people around me that I either directly knew or did not know, and I wanted to do a book that was just kind of like pushing back against my own personal experiences.

But a lot of it is also just about, what are the ways that we can write love letters to each other inside of our community? Because the marketplace of literature for Black folks is very much steeped in trauma, antagonism, the systems that we operate under. And the book obviously touches on some of that, but I think I wanted to spend more time elevating what it means to be a Black person in this country.

What do you want people to take away when they read “Black Genius”?

Two things — one, the enduring power of the imagination. I mean, so much of this book is about Black folks who imagine how to do things differently. But, also, what I hopefully have stuck the landing on throughout the book is that none of those imaginary visions and ideas came in isolation. They were all happening in community with other people. And those are two things I want people to take away from this. It’s the importance of imagination, but equally, more so the importance of being in community with other people while we dream.

So this is book one. Are we going to get another one? What’s next for Tre Johnson?

I’m doing a couple of, as we call [it in] the industry, collaborative projects with VIP people, working on a couple of books with some folks.

But then I want to explore some things around American vigilantism in the country. I’m prepping to do that as a next book, and then I’m hoping to get back to my roots a bit more, which is to do some more creative-type writing, so I’m toying around with some screenplay and script work.