Joanna Brooks is a national voice on Mormon life and politics and an award-winning scholar of religion and American culture.  The author of The Book of Mormon Girl:  Stories from an American Faith, she is a senior correspondent for the on-line magazine ReligionDispatches.org and has been named one of “50 Politicos to Watch” by Politico.com.

A twenty-year veteran of the Mormon feminist movement, she was the subject of an extensive CNN.com profile: “Crossing the Plains and Kicking up Dirt: A New Mormon Pioneer” at CNN.com (February 5, 2012) and of the acclaimed American Public Media show On Being’s “Mormon Demystified” show (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, as well as on PBS Religion and Ethics Newsweekly, Al-Jazeera English and Estonian national television.  Her writing has appeared in the Washington Post, Huffington Post, Killing the Buddha, and Michigan Quarterly Review and she has been utilized as a source on contemporary Mormonism by the New York Times, Reuters, Salt Lake Tribune, Associated Press, Washington Post, Salon, New America Media, Pittsburgh Gazette-Post, The Tennessean, Headline News Network, Fox News, the Boston Globe, Newsweek, and the Deseret News.

Brooks is also writing about Mormonism and public life for the Future of Religion in America book series (Columbia University Press) and writes a regular column at Askmormongirl.com.

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.