Writer Bios

We couldn't offer The Well to our readers without the generous contributions of our writers. Read through their bios to learn from their stories and click through for links to the articles they have written. If you are interested in writing for The Well, explore our Writer's Guidelines.

Katharine Hayhoe

In addition to serving as Chief Scientist for The Nature Conservancy, Katharine Hayhoe is the Endowed Professor in Public Policy and Public Law and Paul W. Horn Distinguished Professor at Texas Tech University. She served as a lead author for the Second, Third, and Fourth US National Climate Assessment and hosts the PBS digital series Global Weirding. She is the Climate Ambassador for the World Evangelical Alliance and has been named one of Time’s “100 Most Influential People,” Fortune’s “50 Greatest Leaders,” and Foreign Policy’s “100 Leading Global Thinkers.” (Photo credit: Ashley Rodgers)

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Naomi Haynes received her PhD in anthropology from the University of California, San Diego, and is currently a Chancellor’s Fellow in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. Her scholarship has examined the relationship between Pentecostal Christianity and social life in urban Zambia. She is a co-curator for anthrocybib, the Anthropology of Christianity Bibliographic Blog. In her spare time, she enjoys running, baking, and reading novels.

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Krystal Hays, PhD, is the director of the Doctor of Social Work program and an assistant professor of social work at California Baptist University.

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Rev. Ellen Williams Hensle

The Rev. Ellen Williams Hensle is the Associate Pastor for Youth and Discipleship at Westminster Presbyterian Church in Austin, Texas. She moved to Austin last year after finishing her MDiv at Princeton Theological Seminary. Ellen graduated with a BA in English Literature from the University of Pennsylvania, where she also served as a campus staff minister for InterVarsity. When she’s not pastoring, she loves making music of all kinds and exploring her new home state.

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Catherine Hervey

Catherine Hervey received her MFA in fiction from the Sewanee School of Letters. She lives in Glen Ellyn, Illinois, with her husband and daughter, where she contributes to Books and Culture and collects rejection letters.

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Phileena Heuertz

Phileena Heuertz is the author of Pilgrimage of a Soul and a founding partner of Gravity, a Center for Contemplative Activism. For nearly twenty years she and her husband, Chris, codirected an international nonprofit in more than seventy countries, building community among victims of human trafficking, survivors of HIV and AIDS, abandoned children, and child soldiers and war brides.

Spiritual director, yoga instructor, public speaker, retreat guide, and author, Phileena is passionate about spirituality and making the world a better place. She has led contemplative retreats for a number of faith communities, including Word Made Flesh, World Vision International, and Compassion International. In addition, she is sought after as a speaker at universities, seminaries, and conferences such as Q, Catalyst, Urbana, and the Center for Action and Contemplation. Phileena was also named an “Outstanding Alumni” by Asbury University and one of Outreach magazine’s “30 Emerging Influencers Reshaping Leadership.”

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Micheal Hickerson

Micheal Hickerson, former Associate Director for InterVarsity’s Emerging Scholars Network, lives and works in Cincinnati with his wife Elizabeth and their three children.

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Jenny Hill (@Bibliophile84) received her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from St. Cloud State University and is currently working towards her Ed. D. and administrative license through Bethel University, St. Paul, MN. She is an elementary school library media specialist. She blogs weekly about disability and spirituality at http://jwalkinguphill.blogspot.com.

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Kimberly Hill specializes in African American history and Black internationalism. She has taught at the University of Texas at Dallas since 2014 with a previous appointment at Del Mar College. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2008, with missions related coursework from Dr. Grant Wacker at Duke Divinity School. A Higher Mission is her first book, and she has published chapters in the following books: Africa Bears Witness, Alabama Women, and Faith and Slavery in the Presbyterian Diaspora.

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Marlita Hill teaches artists how their faith and art thrive together in church ministry and career life. She is the author of the book series Dancers! Assume the Position. She produces a weekly podcast called The Kingdom Art Life, and she is the creator of The Kingdom Artist Initiative, a discipleship program for artists working in “secular” culture. She also runs the Artist Prayer Collective, in partnership with The Salvation Army, Hollywood, and serves as the Associate Director for Edge Project, a missions organization focused on art, culture, and faith.

She is also a working artist. She has been a dancer, teacher, and choreographer for over 20 years. Her art life started in ministry in 1993 with The Hush Company, a Los Angeles based dance ministry directed by Stacy Meadows and LaQuin Snowden. After eight years there, she went on to earn her BFA in Dance Performance and Education (Towson University, MD), co-founded a dance program at a performing arts high school in downtown Los Angeles (where she taught for seven years), and started her own dance company, Speak Hill Dance Project.

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Lauren Holahan coordinates the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction State Systemic Improvement Plan for special education.

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Jennifer L. Holberg

Jennifer Holberg received her PHD in English from the University of Washington. She joined the English department of Calvin College in 1998. Her academic interests include the intersections of faith and literature, 18th- through 21st-century British literature, and gender and literature, including "middlebrow" women novelists. Her book, Shouts and Whispers: 21 Writers Speak About Their Writing and Their Faith, was published by Eerdmans in 2006. She blogs with The Twelve: Reformed Done Daily.

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Wendy Quay Honeycutt

Wendy serves on staff with the Stanford InterVarsity Graduate & Faculty Ministries. She comes from an international background having been born in Malaysia and grown up in Australia. After practicing law in Melbourne for ten years, she moved to Oxford in the UK where she studied apologetics and theology. She is married to Jared whom she met in the grad fellowship at Oxford and they now live in Palo Alto, California. In her spare time she rides horses, cooks delicious meals with Jared, and watches Star Trek episodes on Netflix.

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Nicole Howe is a writer, speaker, wife, and homeschooling mama to four kiddos. She serves as editor and regular contributor for the quarterly publication An Unexpected Journal and is a regular contributor for the online magazine Cultivating. She holds a Masters Degree in Cultural Apologetics from Houston Baptist University where she discovered the power of the imagination to restore awe and wonder to her floundering faith. When she's not devouring books, Nicole loves singing, pretending to be a chef, and performing Improv at her local theater.

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Liuan Huska is a freelance journalist and writer at the intersection of ecology, embodiment, and faith. She is the author of Hurting Yet Whole: Reconciling Body and Spirit in Chronic Pain and Illness, a book weaving memoir, theology, and sociocultural critique. Liuan has written reported and opinion pieces for Christianity Today, Spirituality and Health, The Christian Century, BioLogos, and other publications. She is a regular columnist for Sojourners magazine and a fellow with the Religion and Environment Story Project.

Liuan lives with her family on the ancestral lands of several Native tribes, including the Potawatomi, near Chicago. When not writing, she might be found gardening, trying to identify edible plants, dancing in her living room, and breathing.

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Katy Bowser Hutson

Katy Bowser Hutson is a forming member of the children's band Rain for Roots. She is the author of Now I Lay Me Down to Fight, coauthor with Tish Harrison Warren and Flo Paris Oakes of Little Prayers for Ordinary Days, and a contributing author to It Was Good: Making Music to the Glory of God and Wild Things and Castles in the Sky.

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Carmen Joy Imes

Carmen Joy Imes (PhD, Wheaton) is associate professor of Old Testament in the Talbot School of Theology at Biola University. A graduate of Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, she is the author of Bearing YHWH's Name at Sinai, Bearing God's Name: Why Sinai Still Matters, Being God's Image: Why Creation Still Matters, and the editor of Praying the Psalms with Augustine and Friends.

Imes has written for a variety of websites, including Christianity Today, The Well, and the Politics of Scripture blog. She is a fellow of Every Voice, a member of the Evangelical Theological Society, the Institute for Biblical Research, and the Society of Biblical Literature. Imes and her husband, Daniel, have followed God's call around the globe together for over 25 years.

Read Carmen's article on being God's image as a woman in the academy and the church.

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Sally Ivaska is the wife of David, mother of four sons, and proud grandmother of Zadie Marie. She has a master of arts in teaching from the University of Wisconsin and a master’s in linguistics from Northeastern Illinois University. Her passions — small group Bible study and all things cross-cultural — have taken many forms over the years: hosting international students, coordinating small groups for her church, serving as the International Student Advisor at North Park University, and training African students to study Scripture inductively and write their own discussion materials. Sally is never far from a book or a friend and enjoys life most when her “plate is full.”

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Leslie Iwai is an installation artist who draws upon her multidisciplinary background in mathematics, chemistry and architecture to create interactive and material rich environments.

“Two important questions I ask when I am making something are ‘How is it?’ and ‘What is it?’, usually in that order. Through this, I am inevitably led to new connections and uncovered narratives. One of my favorite seminars in graduate school was Craft and Scholarship where I happened upon the threads between the woven, the engine and the feminine. Between the hardness and softness of these three, my work rests.”

Leslie Iwai lives and works in Middleton, Wisconsin where she makes her art, teaches, untangles knots and occasionally goes to an orchard with her husband.

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Carolyn Custis James

Carolyn Custis James is involved in equipping women through the Whitby Forum and Synergy. She is the author of several books, including The Gospel of Ruth: Loving God Enough to Break the Rules (Zondervan, 2008).

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