Joanna 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.

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.

Her writing about contemporary Mormonism has been published in the Huffington Post,  Religion Dispatches, Killing the Buddha, Sunstone, and Dialogue and featured in the New York Times and on National Public Radio’s Interfaith Voices and Radio West programs.  She has also been a subject of the acclaimed Mormon Stories podcast series.

She has published award-winning poetry, fiction, and non-fiction in literary journals such as Zyzzyva and Blue Mesa Review. In 2009, she was awarded a residency at the Hedgebrook women writers’ retreat to work on a memoir about growing up Mormon.

She lives in San Diego with her husband, two children, and an adopted rez dog named Mosi.