Guest Speakers

Ron Hansen

Ron Hansen was educated in English literature at Creighton University, then studied fiction writing at the University of Iowa's Writers Workshop and at Stanford University, where he held a Wallace Stegner Creative Writing Fellowship.  He is the author of eight novels, including The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Mariette in Ecstasy, Exiles, and A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion, as well as a children's book and A Stay Against Confusion:  Essays on Faith & Fiction.  He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and the John Simon Guggenheim, Lyndhurst, and Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest foundations.  Twice nominated for a PEN/Faulkner Award, he was a finalist for the National Book Award for his novel Atticus, and is a recipient of an Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.  Scribner will publish She Loves Me Not: New and Selected Stories in November, 2012.  Married to the novelist Bo Caldwell, Mr. Hansen is the Gerard Manley Hopkins, S.J. Professor in the Arts and Humanities at Santa Clara University.

Leslie Leyland Fields

Leslie Leyland Fields is the author/editor of 8 creative nonfiction books, including The Spirit of Food, Surviving the Island of Grace: A Life on the Far Edge of America  and Parenting is Your Highest Calling .  . . and Eight Other Myths (Waterbrook). Her essays have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Beliefnet, Orion  Christianity Today and many others. She has appeared on more than 100 radio shows, and travels widely speaking at conferences, churches and universities on topics related to the spirituality of food, creation care, literature, family and culture. Teaching has been a vital part of her life as well. She taught in Seattle Pacific University’s MFA program for six years, and has taught Literature and Creative writing at the University of Alaska and Covenant College. Her essays have won Pushcart nominations, the William Wilberforce Award and the Virginia Faulkner Award. Her next book, Forgiving our Fathers and Mothers is forthcoming from Thomas Nelson.

Leslie lives in Kodiak, Alaska with her husband and three school-age children. In the summer, her three older children return to their fishcamp island where they all work together in commercial salmon fishing.

Most of all, Leslie is deeply grateful to be a worker in the vineyard. She’s neither swift nor agile, but she's confident the good work of Grace begun in her will be brought to completion in the day of Christ. Until then, she is happy to serve with you and among you, grapes between her toes, seeds in her teeth.  

Andrea Dilley

Andrea Palpant Dilley grew up in Kenya as the daughter of Quaker missionaries and spent the rest of her childhood in the Pacific Northwest. Her work as a documentary producer has aired nationally on American Public Television. Her work as a writer has been published in Geez, Utne Reader and the anthology Jesus Girls: True Tales of Growing Up Female and Evangelical, as well as online with CNN, Huffington Post, Duke Divinity, and Christianity Today. Her memoir, Faith and Other Flat Tires: Searching for God on the Rough Road of Doubt, tells the story of her faith journey. Andrea lives with her husband and their two daughters in Austin, Texas. For more information, visit Andrea at http://andreapalpantdilley.com or on Facebook.