Brook Wilensky-Lanford

Brook Wilensky-Lanford is a creative nonfiction writer and a scholar of religion and literature. She is dedicated to helping writers tell stories to various publics, through the intersecting genres of scholarship, journalism, and literature.

Brook is the author of the narrative history Paradise Lust: Searching for the Garden of Eden (Grove Press, 2011), a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice; former editor of the twenty-year-old literary magazine Killing the Buddha; and co-editor of a “Nonfiction Religion” special issue of CrossCurrents. Her essays and reviews have appeared in Guernica, Triple Canopy, Lapham’s Quarterly, The San Francisco Chronicle, the New Yorker books blog, and The New Republic. 

Currently a PhD candidate in Religion in the Americas at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, her dissertation, “Keep the Pearly Gates Ajar For Me,” traces the literary and racial history of heavenly accessibility from the Civil War to World War I. Find her on Twitter @modmyth.