Fred Bahnson is director of the Food, Faith, & Religious Leadership Initiative at Wake Forest University School of Divinity. He is the author of Soil & Sacrament: A Spiritual Memoir of Food and Faith (Simon & Schuster, Aug. 2013) and co-author of Making Peace with the Land (InterVarsity Press, 2012). He holds a masters in theological studies from Duke Divinity School. After being drawn to the agrarian life while serving as a peaceworker among Mayan coffee farmers in Chiapas, Mexico, he returned to the U.S. and in 2005 co-founded Anathoth Community Garden, a church-supported agriculture ministry in Cedar Grove, NC which he then directed until 2009. His essays have appeared in Oxford American, Image, Christian Science Monitor, Orion, The Sun, Christian Century, and the anthologies Best American Spiritual Writing 2007 (Houghton Mifflin), Wendell Berry and Religion (Univ. Press of Kentucky) and State of the World 2011—Innovations that Nourish the Planet (Norton). Award include a 2006 Pilgrimage Essay Award, a 2008 William Raney scholarship in creative nonfiction at Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, a 2009-10 Kellogg Food & Community fellowship, and a 2012 North Carolina Artist fellowship in creative nonfiction from the NC Arts Council. He lives with his wife and three sons in Transylvania County, North Carolina.