Books & Authors

Caroline Beidler, MSW is a recovery advocate and founder of the recovery storytelling platform Circle of Chairs, and has twenty years in leadership within social work and ministry. She is also the author of Downstairs Church: Finding Hope in the Grit of Addiction and Trauma Recovery. Her forthcoming book with Lake Drive will explore the connection between intergenerational trauma, recovery, and healing, offering five rhythms of transformation. She lives in eastern Tennessee.

Lemuel Blackett is an ordained minister and has been in ministry for 22 years. Originally from London, he moved to New York in the late 1980s. He is a graduate of Eastern Baptist School of Religion​. He’s currently Donor and Corporate Relations Manager at Interfaith Community Services. His book, Help, I’m Dealing with Trauma offers stories and insights to help readers acknowledge all the ways we can experience trauma and how to create a mindset to move forward. He lives in San Diego, California.

Cynthia Vacca Davis is an adjunct professor with an MFA in writing, teaching narrative nonfiction at Christopher Newport University. She’s written hundreds of feature stories, columns, and essays, as well as young adult novels. She enjoys telling stories, always searching for the threads that connect us to community. Her memoir Intersexion is told from alternating first-person perspectives and plays out at the intersection of social and religious tension around gender and sexuality. She lives in southwestern Virginia.

Jeff Elkins, a graduate of Baylor University and Truett Seminary, was a pastor for 15 years. He left ministry to work as a writer for a tech company and is the author of more than 10 novels and 100 short stories. He is the host of the Dialogue Doctor and co-host with Leigh Erdman of the newly launched Just Came for the Tacos about life after the evangelical church. His forthcoming book will provide hope for a Christianity that can be resurrected post-evangelicalism. He lives north of Baltimore with his wife and five kids.

Brandon Flanery writes about honest, messy things, specifically around faith and sexuality. He’s published with the Colorado Springs Indy, The Scribe, Baptist News Global, and has academic essays with the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. His forthcoming memoir is about being raised in evangelical Christendom as a closeted gay man, and unwinding what is real and true for him post-closet, an ever-twisting journey—full of trailblazing, thorn bushes, and dead ends. He lives in Atlanta.

Matt Kendziera is a speaker, podcaster, and musician. He is the host of Chasing Goodness, engaging authors, activists, and influencers on questions most people run from. He’s also a collaborator with organizations such as Rachel’s Challenge. Matt’s Bring It Home: The Adventure of Finding Yourself after Being Lost in Religion shows how stories and experiences are what connect us most intimately to the Divine, and that in our quest to find God we must first find ourselves. Matt lives with his family in Wisconsin.

Kate J. Meyer is an author, the host of #MentalHealthMondayswithKate, a public speaker, professional counselor, and ordained minister. Kate is the author of The Red Couch, a novel just out in summer 2021 about missed expectations and seeing how the past doesn’t define but informs you. Kate’s book Faith Doesn’t Erase Grief is a get-help-now manual on loss and grief at the intersections of faith and psychology, helping spiritual readers see loss more clearly. A fan of NaNoRiMo writing goals, she lives in western Michigan.

Scott Okamoto is a writer, musician, podcaster, and storyteller. He’s spent much of his professional career teaching English at a Christian college, witnessing the experience of marginalized people there, which he relays in his podcast Chapel Probation. His Asian American Apostate: Losing Religion and Finding Myself at an Evangelical University tells his unlikely spiritual journey, bringing together an evangelical past, an Asian American experience, with a contemporary world of Christian evangelicalism. He lives in Southern California with his wife and three kids.

Julia Rocchi writes prose, poetry, and prayers. She holds an MA in Writing and has published stories in Furious Gravity and Dappled Things, and other stories in the Saturday Evening Post, jmww, Bourbon Penn, 3Elements Review, Reflex Fiction and others. Julia’s forthcoming book, Amen?, is a collection of graceful musings, prayers and poems for a wandering, wondering, doubt-laden, hope-filled faith that reflects the desire to believe as much as belief itself. Julia blogs at www.juliarocchi.com and lives in northern Virginia with her family.

Marla Taviano is into books, love, justice, globes, anti-racism, blue, gray, rainbows, poems. She reads and writes for a living (especially @whitegirllearning). She’s a mom to some freaking awesome kids, and wears her heart on her t-shirts. On a mission/ quest/ journey to live wholefarted (not a typo). She’s the author of unbelieve: poems on the journey to becoming a heretic and jaded: a poetic reckoning with white evangelical christian indoctrination.