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.

 

Jon Boyd leads the digital communications team at InterVarsity Press, where they love books (and talking about them). He blogs for IVP at Behind the Books, and you can follow him in many places online. He came to the Press after stints with North Park University, InterVarsity’s Graduate & Faculty Ministries, and Britannica.com, with a Ph.D. in history from Johns Hopkins. He reads (whenever left to himself long enough), keeps score at baseball games, and favors mid-’70s Grateful Dead shows.

Lorita is a mother of six (three by marriage), a grandmother, writer, Spiritual Director and intercessor. She has remained actively involved with InterVarsity since she was a student. Lorita is the author of Bathsheba’s Lament.

Andrea Bridges works in the Graduate College at the University of Illinois. She is a former Editor at The Well and believes words can create connection over space and time. Andrea has an MDiv from Duke Divinity School and lives in Urbana, Illinois with her husband, Matt, three kids, and one dog. You’ll often find her in the garden or cheering at various youth sports.

 

Amy is currently pursuing a PhD at Saint Louis University in Higher Education Administration. Her endeavor is to work on partnerships between higher education and civil service organizations with a specific focus in international higher education. Amy has an M.A.T. in Secondary English Education and an M.A. in English Literature. She is an avid reader of biographies and loves children. She lives part-time in Ghana and tries to sneak some traveling in between international layovers. Amy maintains a blog about Ghana with lots of beautiful pictures and other commentaries on faith and life at raisingloveblog.org.

Anna Broadway is a writer and Web editor living near San Francisco. The author of Sexless in the City: A Memoir of Reluctant Chastity, she also contributed to the anthologies Disquiet Time, Talking Taboo, and Faith at the Edge. She holds an M.A. in religious studies from Arizona State University and has written for TheAtlantic.com, Books and Culture, Christianity Today, The Journal of the History of Sexuality, Paste and other sites. She also contributes regularly to the Her.meneutics blog. Find her on Twitter @annabroadway or visit sexlessinthecity.net.

Jamiella Brooks is an Associate Director of the Center for Teaching and Learning. Her primary work at CTL focuses on programming and support for equitable and inclusive teaching practices. Jamilella earned her PhD in French Literature at University of California, Davis, and her BA in English at Oberlin College. She has served as a Fulbright Teaching Assistant in France and participated in the McNair Scholarship and Mellon Fellows programs. Her teaching and research interests include sociolinguistics, language and power, discourse analysis, and anticolonial pedagogies, and she has presented on codeswitching and linguistic equity. Her current project involves analyzing pedagogical practices of settler colonial education that persist in present-day teaching practices. Prior to coming to Penn, Jamiella served as founding director of the Teaching Assistant Program at Berea College. Jamiella is a mother of two, wife of Lindsay, descendant, and daughter.  

Lathania Brown is a second-year doctoral student at The Ohio State University. She is pursuing a Ph.D. in Public Policy and Management with a research emphasis in the area of Economic Policy. Lathania hopes to return to her home city, Kingston, Jamaica, to engage in economic and community development efforts there. When not working on her research project, Lathania spends time with friends and family, catches up on sleep, and listens to audiobooks. She also enjoys building relationships with persons who are interested in having open and honest conversations about faith.

Charlene Brown holds a BA in Religion from the University of Virginia, a Master of Divinity from Duke University, and is currently in grad school plotting her way to medical school. She has served in an array of ministry contexts and is an ordained pastor in the Association of Vineyard Churches. She resides in the North Street Community in Durham, North Carolina, a community dedicated to living intentionally with men and women with and without developmental disabilities.

Eugenia Sherman Brown took her PhD in History from the University of Wisconsin. She has taught for Carroll College, Edgewood College, Trinity and Fuller Seminaries, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison Extension. She relishes creating mosaics, traveling, and centering prayer.

Elizabeth Brunner is a stay-at-home mother with a PhD in linguistics. She is delighted to be expecting her second child. She and her family are striving to live a life that glorifies God in the St. Louis, Missouri area. 

Beth Bruno received her MA in International Community Development from Northwest University after serving on staff with CRU for a decade, mostly in the Middle East. She received her BA in Social Policy from Northwestern University. She is the Founder and Director of A Face to Reframe, which reframes marginalized populations with dignity through participatory photography, as well as the Manager of Domestic Sex Trafficking with the U COUNT Campaign. She is the co-author of END: Engaging Men to End Sex Trafficking and a proud member of Redbud Writer’s Guild. Her writings and activities can be found at bethbruno.org.

Kurt is a father of four incredible daughters, the husband of one amazing wife, and is employed as an IT Project Manager. He was on staff with InterVarsity from 2011 through 2017 serving Urbana and the IT Services team. His parents still have that keyboard and bring it out for the grandkids.

Cindy Bunch is associate publisher and director of editorial at InterVarsity Press, where she has worked for more than thirty years. She acquires and develops for the Formatio line of spiritual formation books. She is the author of Be Kind to Yourself. You can follow her on Instagram at cindy.bunch or on Twitter at @cindybunch.

Suzanne Burden holds an M.A. in Theological Studies from Grace Theological Seminary and is the coauthor of Reclaiming Eve: The Identity and Calling of Women in the Kingdom of God (Beacon Hill Press, March 2014). She and her husband David live in Indiana, where she insists spring is about to arrive.

Carmen Acevedo Butcher is a professor of English and scholar-in-residence at Shorter University in Rome, Georgia. She was the Carnegie Foundation professor of the year for Georgia in 2006, and during the 2004-2005 year she and her family lived and learned in Seoul, South Korea, while she taught as a Fulbright Senior Lecturer at Sogang University. She has written books on medieval women mystics and linguistics. More information can be found on these at her website. (Photo credit: Katherine Butcher.)

Kathleen A. Cahalan is professor of practical theology at Saint John’s Graduate School of Theology and Seminary where she teaches courses on pastoral ministry, pastoral care, and spirituality. She is also the director of the Collegeville Institute Seminars, a collaborative research project that has studied various aspects of vocation over the past eight years. She co-edited two volumes from the project: Calling All Years Good: Vocation throughout Life’s Seasons (2017) and Calling in Today’s World: Voices from Eight Faith Perspectives (2016). She has also authored books for church audiences, including Stories We Live: Finding God’s Calling All around Us (2017) and Living Your Discipleship: Seven Ways to Express Your Deepest Calling, co-authored with Laura Kelly Fanucci (2015).  She is currently the coordinator for the Lilly Endowment’s Called to Lives of Meaning and Purpose Initiative.

 

Adele Ahlberg Calhoun (MA at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary) currently co-pastors Redeemer Community in Wellesley, Massachusetts, with her husband, Doug. She was formerly Pastor of Spiritual Formation at Christ Church in Oak Brook, Illinois. A trained spiritual director, she has taught courses at Wheaton College and Northern Baptist Theological Seminary. In the early 1970s she helped pioneer student work with the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students in Southeast Asia and the Middle East. She has also worked with InterVarsity Christian Fellowship in New England and Canada and with the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students in the West Indies and South Africa.

A native of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Brenda Cárdenas is the author of two poetry collections, From the Tongues of Brick and Stone (Momotombo Press, 2005) and Boomerang (Bilingual Review Press, 2009), as well as the coeditor of Between the Heart and the Land / Entre el corazon y la tierra: Latina Poets in the Midwest. She writes in a blend of English and Spanish, which she has said reflects her interest in “the interconnectedness and juxtapositions of difference and similarity between seemingly disparate peoples, events, places, and experiences.” While Cárdenas often writes in free verse, she also experiments with a variety of forms, and, as Craig Santos Perez has noted, “This syncretic formal impulse reflects the polyphonic texture of Cárdenas’s language-scape.” Her poetry has appeared in a number of anthologies and journals, including The City Visible: Chicago Poetry for the New Century (2007) and The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry (2007). She is a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and was Milwaukee’s poet laureate from 2010 to 2012.

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