Kelly J. Baker

Award-winning author Kelly J. Baker is a freelance writer with a religious studies PhD who covers religion, racism, higher education, gender, labor, motherhood, and popular culture. She’s written for The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Rumpus, Chronicle Vitae, Religion & Politics, Killing the Buddha, and The Washington Post among others.

Her first book, Gospel According to the Klan: The KKK’s Appeal to Protestant America, 1915-1930 (University Press of Kansas, 2011), won the American Library Association Choice Award in 2012. She is also the author of The Zombies Are Coming!: The Realities of the Zombie Apocalypse in American Culture (Bondfire Books, 2013), Grace Period: A Memoir in Pieces (killing the buddha and Blue Crow Books, 2017), and Sexism Ed: Essays on Gender and Labor in Academia (Blue Crow Books, 2017).

She’s also the editor of Women in Higher Education, a feminist newsletter, in its 26th year, with the continued goal “to enlighten, encourage, empower and enrage women on campus.”

When she’s not writing assignments, editing, or wrangling two children, a couch dog, and a mean kitty, she’s writing about zombie apocalypses and their discontents for the University Press of Kansas and slowly making her way toward a collections of essays about endings and other apocalypses.