Our Staff
Sara began her association with Image as an intern in 2000 and maintained her relationship with Image since. She worked for 12 years running a company in the health information industry and launched two other small businesses, including spending ten years as a working portrait photographer, before ultimately returning to the Image team in 2017. She lives in the Seattle area.
James K.A. Smith is professor of philosophy at Calvin College and prior to joining Image in 2018 was editor in chief of Comment magazine for six years. An award-winning author and speaker, his books include On the Road with St. Augustine, Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism?, Imagining the Kingdom, and You Are What You Love. He has written for the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Slate, First Things, Christianity Today, Books & Culture, and The Hedgehog Review.
Mary Kenagy Mitchell began working at Image in 2000 as managing editor. Her short stories and essays have appeared in Image, Good Letters, The Millions, 3 Quarks Daily, Georgia Review, Beloit Fiction Journal, St Katherine Review, and Bearings Online. She lives in Seattle.
A Pacific Northwest Native, Ryan Pemberton’s career has spanned business, ministry / theology, and higher education. Ryan graduated from Western Washington University, before spending four years working in public relations, marketing, and communications at a small PNW agency. Moving to Oxford, England in 2010, Ryan was a scholar-in-residence at The Kilns, C.S. Lewis’s former home; he served as the President of the Oxford University C.S. Lewis Society; and he was a founding member of the Oxford Open Forum, a weekly interreligious dialogue group. After earning his MA in Theology from Oxford, Ryan moved to Durham, North Carolina, where he later earned his Master of Theological Studies at Duke Divinity school. For five years, Ryan led University Ministries in Berkeley, California. For two years, he served remotely as Marketing and Communications Manager for the Graduate Theological Union, an interreligious and interdisciplinary consortium of theological graduate schools in North Berkeley.
Ryan is the author of two books, Called: My Journey to C. S. Lewis’s House and Back Again (Leafwood Publishers, 2015) and Walking with C. S. Lewis (Lexham Press, 2017), as well as a regular contributor to Sojourners Magazine, Christianity Today, and other publications. He is a Board Member at Edible Hope Community Kitchen, a ministry of St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Ballard, where he serves on Tuesday evenings; a member of Redmond Presbyterian Church, where he is an inquirer in the ordination process; and a Board Member of Radix Magazine. Father to Emma and Hudson, Ryan enjoys cheering his kids on at their sports games, running Queen Anne Crown, reading, writing, and hosting thoughtful conversations around home-cooked meals.
Amanda Cordero first joined Image in 2019 as an intern. A voracious reader, Amanda studied literature at Baylor University (B.A., University Scholars, 2019) and the University of Edinburgh (MSc in Literature and Modernity, 2020). Born and raised in Texas, she now lives in New Haven, Connecticut.
Our Editors
James K.A. Smith is professor of philosophy at Calvin College and prior to joining Image in 2018 was editor in chief of Comment magazine for six years. An award-winning author and speaker, his books include On the Road with St. Augustine, Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism?, Imagining the Kingdom, and You Are What You Love. He has written for the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Slate, First Things, Christianity Today, Books & Culture, and The Hedgehog Review.
Mary Kenagy Mitchell began working at Image in 2000 as managing editor. Her short stories and essays have appeared in Image, Good Letters, The Millions, 3 Quarks Daily, Georgia Review, Beloit Fiction Journal, St Katherine Review, and Bearings Online. She lives in Seattle.
Shane McCrae’s most recent books are The Gilded Auction Block (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018) and In the Language of My Captor (Wesleyan University Press, 2017). He has received a Lannan Literary Award, a Whiting Writer’s Award, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and a fellowship from the NEA. He teaches at Columbia University and lives in New York City.
Winner of the Flannery O’Connor, Carl Sandburg, and Janet Heidinger Kafka Awards, among others, and emeritus professor of English at Arizona State University, Melissa Pritchard has published ten books of fiction and appeared in journals and magazines including the Paris Review, Ecotone, A Public Space, Conjunctions, Gettysburg Review, Ploughshares, The Nation, Wilson Quarterly and O, The Oprah Magazine. She has received three Pushcart Prizes and two O. Henry Awards for her short fiction, as well as an NEA fellowship, Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers Award, and other awards and fellowships. As a teacher and journalist, she has traveled to Ethiopia, Ecuador, Afghanistan, Thailand, and India. Her most recent story collection, The Odditorium, most recent novel, Palmerino, and best-selling volume of essays, A Solemn Pleasure, were published by Bellevue Literary Press. With a fifth novel completed, she is at work on a fifth collection of short stories. She now lives in Columbus, Georgia, where she was the 2016 Carson McCullers Fellow.
Nick writes about poetry, religion, film, books, culture, and sports for Rolling Stone, GQ, The Atlantic, Paris Review, Esquire, Literary Hub, Sewanee Review, Commonweal, Kenyon Review, America, and other publications. He is working on a book about faith and doubt in fiction for Fortress Press.
Dr. Aaron Rosen is a curator, critic, and academic who has taught at Columbia, Yale, Oxford, and King’s College London. He is the author and editor of many books, including Art and Religion in the 21st Century and the children’s book Journey through Art, translated into seven languages.
Lauren F. Winner’s most recent book is The Dangers of Christian Practice: On Wayward Gifts, Characteristic Damage, and Sin (Yale). Her other books include Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis and Wearing God (both from HarperOne). She is associate professor of Christian spirituality at Duke Divinity School.
Gregory Wolfe founded Image in 1989 and edited it for thirty years. He was also the founding director of the Seattle Pacific University MFA program in creative writing. He currently edits a literary imprint, Slant Books, through Wipf & Stock Publishers. Wolfe’s writing has appeared in numerous publications, including the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, First Things, Commonweal, and America. In 2005 he was a judge for the National Book Awards. His books include Beauty Will Save the World, Intruding Upon the Timeless, and The Operation of Grace. www.gregorywolfe.com
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