Kelly J. Baker

Award-winning and Amazon bestselling author Kelly J. Baker is a freelance writer with a religious studies PhD who covers religion, racism, higher education, gender, labor, motherhood, and popular culture. She’s written for The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Rumpus, Chronicle Vitae, Religion & Politics, Killing the Buddha, and The Washington Post among others. Her first book, Gospel According to the Klan: The KKK’s Appeal to Protestant America, 1915-1930 (University Press of Kansas, 2011), won the American Library Association Choice Award in 2012. Her second book, Grace Period: A Memoir in Pieces (Blue Crow Books, 2017), details her life as a mother on the fringes of academia and was named one of the Best Books in New Religion Journalism of the Decade by Religion Dispatches. Her third book, Sexism Ed: Essays on Gender and Labor in Academia (2017), won the Foreword INDIES Gold award for Women’s Studies. Her fourth book, The Zombies Are Coming: The Realities of the Zombie Apocalypse in American Culture (Revised and Expanded Edition, Blue Crow Books, 2020), is the culmination of many years’ research on apocalypses and zombies and was the 2021 Gold Medal Winner from the Florida Authors and Publishers Association (FAPA) President’s Book Awards. And her fifth book, Final Girl: And Other Essays on Grief, Trauma, and Mental Illness (Blue Crow Books, 2020) is another memoir in essays about surviving trauma, learning to live with mental illness, and managing the ongoing nature of grief. With Joseph Fruscione, she co-edited Succeeding Outside of the Academy: Career Paths beyond the Humanities, Social Sciences, and STEM (University Press of Kansas, 2018). Kelly lives in Florida, the wildest state in the U.S., with her partner and two kids. When she’s not writing or editing, wrangling kids and four kitties, or looking out for alligators, she’s working her way toward a collection of essays about endings and other apocalypses.