We apologize but the April Water Cooler did not go out as scheduled.
Reading strengthens your mind, which is essential to your well-being. Research reveals that just 30 minutes a day of reading can improve people’s life experiences . . . our highlights below include new releases, contracts signed, notable reviews and PR events, new authors to the agency and other news of note by clients and agents.
New Releases
Congratulations to Kevin G. Ford with Jim Singleton and IV Press for the April 2, 2024 release of Attentive Church Leadership.
The world has changed. The changes around us present daunting challenges to the church, and we minister in places we have never been in before. But there are no one-size-fits-all solutions because every church needs to attend to its specific situation and calling. We need to listen for not only what to do but also what not to do. In a world screaming in a thousand directions for our focus, it’s essential for us to become attentive to God, our congregation, and our community.
Kevin Ford and Jim Singleton call for attentive churches with attentive leaders who can discern cultural and organizational change and pivot accordingly. Healthy transformation starts with a posture of attention. We need to see what God is already doing in our midst: in our own soul, in our people, and in the communities and culture around us. Chapters explore key questions that attentive leaders ask and offer case studies of attentive churches that have navigated the issues and transitions facing them. As we practice habits of attention, God leads us through the highs and lows of change into the exciting adventure of being on mission with him.
Congratulations to Catherine Ricketts and Broadleaf Books for the April 16, 2024 release of The Mother Artist: Portraits of Ambition, Limitation, and Creativity.
Are caregiving and creative labor fundamentally at odds? Is it possible for mothers to attend to both?
Few women artists feature prominently in the history of art, and even fewer who are mothers. How are motherhood and artmaking at play and at odds in the lives of women? What can we learn about ambition, limitation, and creativity from women who persist in doing both?
Forged in the stress of early motherhood, The Mother Artist explores the fraught yet generative ties between caregiving and creative practice. As a young mother working at a museum, essayist Catherine Ricketts began asking questions about the making of motherhood and the making of art. Now, with incantatory prose and an intuitive gaze, she twines intimate meditations on parenthood with studies of the work and lives of painters, writers, dancers, musicians, and other creatives. Ricketts takes readers through the studios of mother artists, placing us in the company of women from the past and the present who persevere in both art and caregiving. We encounter Senga Nengudi’s sculptures, which celebrate the pregnant body, and Toni Morrison’s powerful writing on childbirth. We behold Joan Didion’s meditations on maternal grief and Alice Neel’s arresting portraits of mothers and babies. And we observe the ambition of sculptor Ruth Asawa, the activism of printmaker Elizabeth Catlett, and the constancy of writer Madeleine L’Engle. The Mother Artist welcomes us into a community of creatives and includes full-color images of their work.
Part memoir, part biography, and part inquiry into the visual, literary, and performing arts, The Mother Artist contends that a brutal world needs art made by those who have cared for the vulnerable. This book is for mothers who aspire to make art, anyone eager to discover the stories of visionary women, and all who long for a revolution of tenderness.
Congratulations to Christy Bauman and Convergent Books for the April 29, 2024 release of Her Rites.
Every woman wants wholeness—to be at home in her body, in her relationships, in her life. But women too often feel that they don’t belong to themselves. The path to wholeness, to a woman belonging to herself, is formidable, and women know they can’t travel it alone.
Author, teacher, and therapist Dr. Christy Angelle Bauman has dedicated her life to guiding women on this path to meaning and profound joy.
In Her Rites, Dr. Bauman takes you into her office and through six transformative exercises: a deep dive into the most common rites of passage in every woman’s life, when she sometimes loses hold of herself but also has a unique opportunity to reclaim herself.
• Birth: claiming how and why you came into the world
• Initiation: coming of age
• Exile: finding yourself
• Creation: bringing something new into the world
• Intuition: acquiring embodied wisdom that comes later in life
• Legacy: living with emotional and spiritual readiness for one’s own death
These rites help women to find wholeness and self-knowledge. Included in Her Rites are ritual templates and exercises that Dr. Bauman employs with her clients, which will help any woman incorporate the principles of self-reclamation into her daily life.
Dr. Bauman has seen again and again that by learning to pause and to reflect on these key moments, we can come home to ourselves and receive the gift of flourishing.
Congratulations to Rick Lawrence and Moody Publishers for the June 4, 2024 release of Editing Jesus: Confronting the Distorted Faith of the American Church.
We need Jesus. The whole Jesus.
The American church is in decline. Secularism is fast gaining traction in culture. Ministry leaders and Christians who love the church are rightly concerned about this momentum. We’re scrambling to find solutions.
Longtime Christian journalist, researcher, and ministry leader Rick Lawrence believes that the driving force propelling the church into irrelevance is its propensity reduce Jesus. Deeply researched and comprehensively sourced, Editing Jesus, explores the 8 ways the Jesus of the contemporary church has been edited to fit the spirit of the age. Lawrence writes on:
The Co-Mingling of Kingdoms
The Marginalization of the Poor
The Golden-Calfing of Materialism
The Dismissing of the Supernatural
The Siren-Song of Platforming
The De-Prioritizing of Justice . . . and more
This book is for every person who loves Jesus and His church—who longs to see the real Jesus worshiped and exalted. And it’s for every person who wonders how the wheels came off Western Christianity and harbors a hunger that goes unmet in the church. When we discover and return to the unedited Jesus, it’s impossible to remain unchanged.
The church begins and ends with Jesus. The whole Jesus.
Contracts
Roger Hutchison signed with 1517 Media for the July 2025 release of Sparrow’s Easter Garden and the September 2025 release of Sparrow’s Blue Christmas.
Jerry Jamison signed with Rowman & Littlefield for the June 2025 release of Dead Air: True Crime.
Marc Cameron signed with Worthy Publishing for the September 2026 release of HEALING FROM YOUR CHILDHOOD: A Guide for How to Heal Your Relationships Through Secure Attachment.
Jerry Lathan signed with Forefront Books for the November 2024 release of Recitals.
Chuck Blakeman signed with Entrepreneur Media for the July 2025 release of Serve Don’t Sell.
Henry Sledge signed with Post Hill Press for the August 2025 release of The Old Breed… The Complete Story Revealed: A Father, A Son and How WWII In the Pacific Shaped Their Lives.
Shawn Horn signed with New Harbinger Publications for the February 2026 release of Communication Skills for Adults with ADHD: A Shame-Free Guide to Manage Hyperverbal Expression, Overcome Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria and Achieve Social Success,
Katie Powner signed with Bethany House for the May 2025 release of Come Around Ranch.
Alexandra MacKillop signed with Rowman & Littlefield for the September 2025 release of Go With Your Flow.
Laurie Polich Short signed with Bethany House for the January 2026 release of Tracking God In Your Life.
Jessie Cruickshank with Julia Schmaltz signed with NAVPress for the April 2026 release of Your Life Is a Good News Story.
New Clients
Julia Schmaltz, Hayley Graham, Kristy Nabhan-Warren, Amelia Tomasi-Ellenstein, Renee Swanson, Adam Boggs, Courtney Ellis, Abgail Favale, Jayne Parenti, and Sarah McDugal recently signed with WordServe. Welcome!
What We’re Celebrating
Congratulations to Carolyn Leiloglou and Linda MacKillop. Their books – Beneath the Swirling Sky by Carolyn Leiloglou and Hotel, Oscar, Mike, Echo by Linda MacKillop were finalists for the category Young People’s Literature by The Evangelical Christian Publishers Association (ECPA).
Congratulations to Russell W. Joyce. His book, His Face Like Mine: Finding God’s Love in Our Wounds received a positive review by Publishers Weekly.
Congratulations to Katie Powner. Her book, The Wind Blows in Sleeping Grass was a finalist in the Contemporary category by the ACFW. The Carol Awards are ACFW’s recognition for the best Christian fiction published in the previous calendar year.
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