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The practice of writing and publishing can be among the most life-giving dimensions of scholarship, and, at times, among the most difficult. Recently, I have held both joy and fear in the same open hand.My latest book is now available: Thinking Teaching: Stories, Insights, and Strategies to Ignite Reflection, Discussion, and Imagination.Thinking Teaching is a collection of blogs I have written for the Wabash Center over more than twenty years. In many ways, this volume most fully reflects my pedagogical commitments, both in content and in form. The book gathers sixty-six essays shaped by story, memory, wonder, and hard-earned wisdom—offerings intended to help teachers teach with greater imagination, reflection, and care. Each essay concludes with questions designed to spark conversation and communal discernment.Throughout the book, I draw from my experiences in classrooms and on faculties, while also leaning into the teachings and memories of family life. Womanist pedagogical commitments guide the work deeply. I understand education as a practice of emancipation, healing, and human flourishing. My hope is that this book will serve as a companion for individual readers, small groups, and faculty communities seeking richer conversations about teaching and the teaching life.Anyone who has published a book knows that writing and publication rarely unfold in a straight line. Books often arrive through detours, disappointments, revisions, unexpected grace and help from friends and colleagues. This was certainly the journey of this manuscript’s becoming.Around 2014, I began to imagine my Wabash blogs as a collected work. Though I had not written them according to a systematic plan, I sensed that together they traced meaningful terrain for colleagues engaged in conversations about teaching. I prepared a proposal for an anthology of these essays and carried it with me to a conference where scholarly and trade publishers gathered in search of new projects.I shared the proposal with several publishers. Most were not interested. Then, during a conversation with a fifth editor, I began to feel hopeful. We had a lively and engaging exchange about teaching, writing, and audience. As the conversation came to a close, she said gently, “Of course, you will expand each blog into a full chapter—right?”My heart sank.I wanted the brief essay form—those 750 to 900-word reflections—to remain intact. I believed the short form carried its own integrity, accessibility, and power. After thanking her for the conversation, I quietly set the project aside. With disappointment lingering close by, I placed the dream of a book-length collection on the back burner.Then, in 2022 I met Donald Quist. Donald became both editor and thoughtful conversation-partner for my writing life. He helped me trust my voice again—particularly my love for short-form creative nonfiction. What began as a professional collaboration soon grew into a relationship marked by shared imagination, intellectual curiosity, and mutual trust. Donald’s editorial guidance deepened my writing, clarified my sense of purpose, and refined my voice. Through his encouragement, I began once again to believe that these collected essays could make a meaningful contribution to theological education. Without hesitation, Donald urged me to pursue the book anew.With renewed confidence, I returned to the manuscript.I then called Jack Seymour for help. Together, we shaped a table of contents that finally felt coherent and spacious. My earlier attempts had been tangled and overworked. From among hundreds of blogs, Jack helped identify sixty-six essays for inclusion in the volume. I prepared a proposal for Wipf and Stock Publishers, and in the spring of 2026, the book came into the world. Somewhere between 2014 and 2026, this book slowly found its way toward becoming. Some books, this book, require more time to ripen before they are ready to meet the world.One of my deepest joys connected to this book is its cover art. The cover features an original painting, Eden #13, by Najee Dorsey, artist and founder of Black Art in America in Atlanta, Georgia. The artwork is luminous and beautiful. For the past two years, the Wabash Center and Black Art in America have been in creative partnership. Through that collaboration, Najee has generously shared his work and encouraged artists within his gallery community to contribute artwork for scholarly book covers. This partnership has blessed us in ways both marvelous and unforeseen.When I received the email from the publisher announcing that Thinking Teaching had been published, I felt an overwhelming sense of gratitude, joy, and humility. The dread and frustration that accompanied parts of the journey seemed to fall away. In their place was a deep appreciation for the possibility that my work might accompany colleagues, nourish meaningful conversations, and encourage more liberative approaches to teaching and learning.Reflection QuestionsIn the blog, I describe my resistance to expanding the brief essays into long chapters because I trusted the “integrity, accessibility, and power” of short forms. What forms of wisdom or truth might theology and religion teachers overlook because academia privileges length, complexity, or abstraction?Who are your trusted conversation partners who cheer you on, bring needed skills and expertise, and allow you space to shine in your writing and scholarly work? List them. Thank them.The writing of some books “require more time to ripen.” What in your teaching life is still ripening? What unfinished idea, classroom practice, or project might need patience rather than productivity?What are your practices of relief and release when dread seizes you? How can you better handle disappointment and rejection?For the colleagues who you mentor, advise, and support, how will you encourage their persistence, agency, and tenacity for their creative work?When your work brings you satisfaction and joy, how do you celebrate? How do you show appreciation for those who assisted you? 

“Write your name, for me, please,” she asked, a sturdy index finger tapping on a piece of paper, on the table at my aunt’s house. She was my paternal grandmother, Johanna, or Teacher Kate, as many people called her, and she was visiting her family in Toronto from Guyana. She would have been in her sixties then, a compact Black woman with flawless skin, a kind, steady gaze, and a resonant alto speaking voice. You could hear the mixture of crisp and precise British-influenced English that would have been expected of schoolteachers of Teacher Kate’s generation, born before World War I, in a corner of Amazonia and at the edge of the British Empire. You could also hear the rhythms of Caribbean creole speech, reflecting Guyana’s cultural legacy of majority populations descended from enslaved Africans and indentured folk from the Indian subcontinent and China, among others. Teacher Kate’s work in classrooms with children began before 1930 as a pupil-teacher, a form of teaching apprenticeship of young teenagers that was regularly practiced in the English-speaking Caribbean, in the early decades of the twentieth century. “Write your name, for me, please.” It was a directive, an invitation, and a question all rolled into one as we gathered around my aunt’s dining table. This was the late 1970s, pre-Internet, and I was in my early teens and already in high school. At that point, I had attended school for almost a decade split between Antigua and Canada, having spent my infancy in England, the country of my birth, as a child of the Windrush migration. The late 1970s was a magical transitional time in Black musical cultures as it was the era of the earliest commercial hip hop recordings, disco, funk, and R n’ B. We also listened to reggae, dancehall, calypso, and soca, Caribbean popular musical genres as well, new wave, punk and pop and rock n’ roll on AM and FM radio—our musical choices reflecting our transnational existence between recent Caribbean memories, the larger social context of a rapidly changing Canadian cultural landscape, contemporary Black Toronto realities in the Caribbean diaspora with close sonic and familial ties to major urban centres in the US and England to which Caribbean people had migrated. My friends and I emulated the look of the Pointer Sisters, The Emotions, or women lead vocalists in Chic. In our stylistic ambitions, we existed on a continuum of retro 1940s, church, and our imagined Studio 54. Our looks were achieved through making our own clothes with Simplicity and Butterick patterns, and reworking and mending heavily discounted seconds (discarded mass-produced clothing with what we considered minor and correctible mistakes like crooked seams and missing buttons) purchased cheaply in the garment district in downtown Toronto. That day I wore a belted, light beige, cap-sleeved dress in a shimmery fabric. My hair was still natural, a few years away from its 1980s curly perm, and picked out into a ‘fro. This was the late 1970s and in Black diasporic girl stylistic cultures in my corner of Toronto afros, cornrows, and other natural styles still reigned supreme with the occasional hot comb pressed straight styles for special occasions. I wondered why Teacher Kate would want me to write my name as an introduction to who I was as a student and her granddaughter. Why not ask me to read out loud or to recite memorized passages of poetry, bible verses, or dramatic plays? I had already had lots of practice in public speaking at school and in church, in Canada, where my first recitation was Langston Hughes’ poem “Freedom.” I remembered the church assembly in the Jamaican Pentecostal congregation that met in the basement of a mainstream Protestant church in our Toronto neighbourhood, now called Little Jamaica. We were Anglicans but my mother insisted that we go to the church down the road and around the corner from our house that we could reach without crossing a major intersection, and where our friends from school, recently arrived kids from the Caribbean, also went to church. “Write your name for me, please.” So, I picked up the pen and I wrote my first name in cursive and print. “Write your whole name.” I wrote my first and last name. My grandmother inspected my writing and complimented it while also giving some pointers to improve the cursive. “Write it larger,” she said. I wrote my name several times and each time I did so with more confidence than earlier versions. Now, I wrote my name every day in school on assignments and had done so for years. My friends and I even practiced our autographs. I had written my name years ago in my British passport as an elementary school student. This occasion, however, felt different. In the analog world of the late 1970s, just a few years before the launch of the digital age, my grandmother was inviting me to come to the table of knowledge, to take up space, and to write myself into the narrative in my own hand, boldly and confidently and with style. Words mattered. I got it. I created my signature in that moment with its large cursive letters. Teacher Kate lived for over three decades after that night, in total just over a hundred years. By the late 1970s she had already taught several generations doing the hard work in the post-slavery and British colonial era of the first half of the twentieth century of teaching literacy. Many had entered Guyana and other Caribbean territories as transports of empire through the forced migrations of the slave trade and indentureship, without signature—perhaps an “x,” or even a thumbprint for the latter. I was only Teacher Kate’s student for that one evening but I learned a crucial lesson of accepting the invitation to take my place and to write my name and write myself into being. Photo by Kat Stokes on Unsplash