Rachel Held Evans is a New York Times best-selling author and popular blogger with more than 250,000 visits to her blog each month. She's been featured in interviews on The View, The Today Show, NPR, Slate, The BBC, The Washington Post, The Guardian (UK), The London Times, The Huffington Post, and Oprah.com.
Rachel is the author of two books, Faith Unraveled: How A Girl Who Knew All the Answers Learned to Ask the Questions (Zondervan, 2014) (Originally released under the title, Evolving in Monkey Town) which explores the relationship between faith and doubt and recounts the challenges of asking tough questions about Christianity in the context of the Bible Belt, and A Year of Biblical Womanhood: How a Liberated Woman Found Herself Sitting on Her Roof, Covering Her Head and Calling Her Husband Master (Thomas Nelson, 2012), which documents her year of following all of the Bible’s instructions for women as literally as possible. In 2015 she released her third book Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving and Finding the Church (Thomas Nelson).
As a speaker, Rachel’s content is well researched and accessible, her delivery fresh and funny. Her youthfulness makes her relevant to the young and old alike. She speaks out of her own experience of growing up in a very conservative church tradition, which led to a crisis of faith during her college years. She now communicates with an appreciation for her foundation of faith while addressing an honest look at what Scripture and the Gospel of Jesus really says to us today.
Her popularity as a writer also keeps her busy speaking across the country at retreats, conferences, universities, and churches. Some of her most recent events have included Q, The Writer’s Symposium by the Sea at Point Loma University, Baylor University Chapel, Fuller Theological Seminary, Abilene Christian University Summit, Mars Hill Church (Grand Rapids), Gordon College, Eastern Nazarene College, Hope International University, The Wild Goose Festival, The Story Conference, The Southern Festival of Books, and Soularize.
Rachel is a skeptic, a creative, and a follower of Jesus. She hails from Dayton, Tenn.—home of the famous Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925—and is a lifelong Alabama Crimson Tide fan. She is happily married to her husband, Dan.