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JOLINA PETERSHEIM
Jolina Petersheim is the highly acclaimed author of How the Light Gets In, The Divide, The Alliance, The Midwife, and The Outcast, which Library Journal called “outstanding . . . fresh and inspirational” in a starred review and named one of the best books of 2013. That book also became an ECPA, CBA, and Amazon bestseller and was featured in Huffington Post’s Fall Picks, USA Today, Publishers Weekly, and the Tennessean. CBA Retailers + Resources called her second book, The Midwife, “an excellent read [that] will be hard to put down,” and Booklist selected The Alliance as one of their Top 10 Inspirational Fiction Titles for 2016. The Alliance was also a finalist for the 2017 Christy Award in the Visionary category. The sequel to The Alliance, The Divide, won the 2018 INSPY Award for Speculative Fiction. How the Light Gets In won the 2020 Audie Award for Faith-based fiction in New York City. Jolina’s non-fiction writing has been featured in Reader’s Digest, Writer’s Digest, Today’s Christian Woman, and Proverbs 31 Ministries.
My heart’s cry for my books is to call forth my readers’ gifts. I want to help unwrap their value. I want them to know they are worthy of love, just as they are.
My Story
I grew up playing Barbies with my best friend while our fathers wrote music in her parents’ bedroom next door. I remember climbing into my father’s saw-dusted Dodge truck and moving the pile of stray 2’’ x 4’’ boards covering the cracked bench seat. Lyrics scrawled that blond pine wood; lyrics my father had written with his carpenter’s pencil whenever a thought or phrase would strike.
He built storage barns to support us, and yet he loved those words.
I must’ve been around this same age—three or four, soon after we moved from Lancaster—when I sat on the cement stoop of our house in Cross Plains, Tennessee, and “wrote” a song in my head. I proudly performed this song for my mother, and though I couldn’t really sing, she declared I had a gift.
Three years later, my parents became volunteer caretakers for a Christian camp, so our family moved from Cross Plains to Adams. We lived in a remodeled slave quarters on a Civil War-era farm until my father finished building our house, and despite the bowed kitchen floor and brown recluses, that season was the sweetest of my childhood.
The entire two years passed like a summer. My older brother and I caught turtles and frogs, picked and ate berries, swam in the cold stream that fed the warmer pond. The great outdoors served as a smorgasbord for my imagination, and I couldn’t get enough.
Around this time, I received the Anne of Green Gables series by L.M. Montgomery, and my song-writing idea turned into a book-writing dream. I read everything I could get my hands on, which sometimes required a hasty return trip to the library, and from that love of reading, I began to love to write.
Two of my greatest writing influences happened during these formative years. My father was raised Mennonite, my mother Brethren, and I grew up as a caretaker’s daughter on a Christian camp. My Plain heritage converged with my unique childhood, and by ten years old, I’d witnessed our heart’s cry for community, belonging, and love.
Twenty-some years later, my heart’s cry for my books is to help point readers to this need for community, which is really our need for identity; our need to be truly understood and seen. Just as my mother encouraged my off-key singing because she sensed I might be beginning to peel back the wrapping on my true gift, I want to call forth my readers’ gifts. I want to help unwrap their value. I want them to know they are worthy of love, just as they are.