Alumna of IWU authors - again. "Craving Grace", Tyndale House Publishing

Lisa Velthouse is a freelance writer and speaker who has been working in communications and ministry for over a decade. She got her start in publishing at the age of 17, upon being selected from over 1,000 applicants to write a year's worth of columns for Brio magazine. While writing for Brio, Lisa began speaking at national Evangelical events for teens, and she also got the idea for her first book, Saving My First Kiss, which was published shortly after she turned 21. In the years that followed, for a time she worked as a ghostwriter, and after that served two years on staff at Mars Hill Bible Church in Grandville, MI.

A believer in God all her life, during her mid-twenties Lisa began to feel disenchanted about him. So for six months she fasted from sweets, in an attempt to learn that God could be sweet. At the start of her fast, she doubted that the process would result in much more than mere discipline, if that. But half a year later, her life and her faith had been transformed. She could see for the first time that it was a story of grace, and she was surprised to find that God's grace is the only true sweetness. Lisa tells the story of her sweets fast and of how life changed for her afterward in her newest book, a memoir called Craving Grace.

Lisa's writing has been noted in Publisher's Weekly and Focus on the Family, and she has been a guest on numerous nationwide radio and television programs. Her travels in speaking have taken her across the United States and abroad. She is married to Nathan, an officer in the U.S. Marine Corps; they live wherever military assignments take them

From Rick Carder

Alumni Director of IWU