Leslie Leyland Fields is a teacher, speaker, and the multi-award winning author of twelve books, including:

• Your Story Matters: Finding, Writing and Living the Truth of Your Life (With a DVD companion video “Your Story for His Glory” from RightNow Media)
• The Wonder Years: 40 Women Over 40 on Aging, Faith, Beauty and Strength
• Crossing the Waters: Following Jesus through the Storms, the Fish, the Doubt and the Seas, which won Christianity Today’s 2017 Book Award in Christian Living.

Her other books include Surviving the Island of Grace (Thomas Dunne), The Spirit of Food: 34 Writers on Feasting and Fasting Toward God  (Cascade Press), and Forgiving Our Fathers and Mothers (Thomas Nelson). The Spirit of Food won three “Best Book of 2010” Awards. Her books have been translated into nine languages. Her essays have appeared in Christianity Today,  Books and Culture, Belief.net, The Atlantic, Orion, Best Essays, and many others earning her a number of Evangelical Press Awards. She served on the Editorial Board of Christianity Today for several years.

With three graduate degrees (in English, Journalism, and an MFA in Creative Nonfiction) she has taught extensively. Leslie was a founding faculty member of Seattle Pacific University’s MFA program; she taught literature and creative writing at the University of Alaska for fifteen years. She has served as Visiting Writer at a number of colleges and universities and leads writing retreats around the world.

She also teaches writing classes online with thousands of students from around the world, instructing in the craft and art of spiritual memoir. A number of her students have gone on to publish their manuscripts, (which makes her incredibly proud!)

Since 2013 she’s been leading The Harvester Island Writers’ Workshop on her family’s island in Alaska. Leslie also leads Food and Faith workshops there, which includes guest chefs and a lot of feasting, cooking, foraging, and discussions on the many ways food and faith intersect.

In 2020, Leslie and Michelle Van Loon began national gatherings for The Wonder Years, bringing women together to equip them to make the second half of life the best half.

She teaches workshops on storymaking and spiritual formation for Lifesprings International, a ministry that brings graduate level teaching to women around the world who have little access to theological education.

She’s also a professional audio narrator, contributing regularly to the popular Our American Stories radio network, and audio recording books of the Bible for her.Bible.org

“Just as we’ve been shepherded into pastures by quiet rivers and through shadowed valleys, we get to shepherd and steward these burdens, all of them, the beautiful, the brilliant, and the horrid. Through telling and writing, we have another chance to reclaim and redeem those moments. And sometimes they are redeemed simply by being faced and called out of the dark. When we can name our ghosts, they haunt us less.”