When I was a boy each week, Sunday we would go to church, pay attention to the priest,

and he would read the Holy Word, and consecrate the Holy Bread, and everyone would kneel and bow,

to tell you all the differences, everything is holding out, everything, everything, everything is holding out.

And when I was in Sunday school, we would learn about the time.

This is Mormon Stories, I'm John DeLin.

Joanna Brooks grew up in a conservative Mormon home among the last great orange grows of Orange County, California.

She attended Brigham Young University and received her PhD from the University of California, Los Angeles.

Her first book, American Lazarus, Religion and the Rise of African American and Native American Literatures,

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 Religion Dispatches,

Killing the Buddha, Sunstone and Dialogue, and featured in the New York Times and on National Public Radio's Radio West.

She has also published award-winning poetry, fiction, and nonfiction in literary journals such as,

Help me out here Joanna.

Ziziba.

Ziziba 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 res dog named Mosie.

Mosie.

Mosie.

Joanna Brooks, welcome to Mormon Stories.

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