Julia Scheeres Blog

The Quality Paperback Book Club (QPB) awarded Jesus Land a "New Visions Award," worth $5,000.

This from the press release:

Jesus Land (Counterpoint, October 2005) is a riveting memoir that offers a heartbreaking portrait of virulent racism, the hypocrisy at the heart of fundamentalist culture —and of the courage it takes to overcome seemingly impossible odds. With impressive journalistic objectivity —and a dash of dark humor —Scheeres takes the reader from the racist hotbed of “Jesus Land” to Escuela Caribe, a prison-like reform school to which the author is sent as a teenager. “Now Julia could have written an indictment of Christianity or rural America or a self-important tale of an abusive childhood,’ says QPB Editor-in-Chief Gary Jansen, “but the remarkable thing about this book is that she just shows us her life and allows us to make our decisions about what she experienced.

Previous New Visions Award winners include: Adrian Nicole Leblanc (Random Family), Richard Rodridguez (Brown), and Michael Pollan (Second Nature)

The Guardian excerpted a piece of "Another Hour on a Sunday Morning," the U.K. title of "Jesus Land," on Saturday:

I learned to believe in people over dogmas

An NBC affiliate in Fort Wayne, Indiana recently did an expose on New Horizons Youth Ministries in which our alumni site was prominently featured:



It's a small yet big thing.