More on: Hannah Faith Notess

An expert from First Baptist Church in coat and tie came with our class to the Natural History Museum to lead the second grade past the error-filled placards on the walls of the Prehistoric Hall, so we could in innocence admire the skeletons of God’s magnificent extinct creation. I hung back as the class clambered…

Mussoorie, India Lying on the bed below you, I never managed to ask you to pray for us, or to see you weep the blood you’re famous for. I just loved to stare— and you didn’t seem to mind— at your barely blushing cheekbones, lit by the angel’s glow. You warmed me with your incandescent…

The Possibilities of Sainthood by Donna Freitas (Farrar Strauss Giroux, 2008) Dark Sons by Nikki Grimes (Hyperion, 2005) Trouble by Gary Schmidt (Clarion Books, 2008) Once Was Lost by Sara Zarr (Little, Brown, 2009) AS A TEENAGER, I was given several novels in a series of inspirational young-adult (YA) books. On their pastel covers, modestly sweatshirted girls with big hair and…

GALA BENT WAS ONCE a landscape painter who lived in Indiana, born and raised in the Midwest. Her paintings, acrylic on paper, featured dark, heavy, and flat horizontal spaces. But she used to dream about mountains. That is, until she found herself surrounded by them. When she and her husband, fellow artist Zack Bent, moved…