Joanna Brooks is a national voice on Mormon life and politics and an award-winning scholar of religion and American culture.  She covers Mormonism, faith, and politics for ReligionDispatches.org and has been named one of “50 Politicos to Watch” by Politico.com.

A twenty-year veteran of the Mormon feminist and LGBT equality movements, Brooks grew up in a conservative Mormon home among the last great orange groves of Orange County, California.  She attended Brigham Young University and received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles.

She was the subject of the acclaimed American Public Media show On Being’s one-hour “Mormon Demystified” episode, airing October 20, 2011. She has also been featured on NPR’s All Things Considered, NPR’s Talk of the Nation, BBC’s Americana, Interfaith Voices, and Radio West.  Her writing has appeared in the Washington Post, Huffington Post, the Michigan Quarterly Review, and Killing the Buddha, and she has been utilized as a source on contemporary Mormonism by the New York Times, Reuters, Salt Lake Tribune, Washington Post, Salon, BBC Sky News, New America Media, Pittsburgh Gazette-Post, The Tennessean, Headline News Network, Fox News, the Boston Globe, Newsweek, and the Deseret News.

Her first book American Lazarus: Religion and the Rise of African-American and Native American Literatures (Oxford University Press, 2003) was awarded the Modern Language Association William Sanders Scarborough Prize. Brooks has also received awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, and the American Philosophical Society for her scholarship on religion and American culture.

She lives in San Diego with her husband and two children.

Read a Voice of San Diego profile about Brooks here.