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Patricia Raybon

Patricia Raybon is a Christy Award–winning author, essayist, and novelist who writes at the daring intersection of faith and race. A former Sunday magazine editor at the Denver Post, Patricia's personal essays have been published in the New York Times Magazine, Newsweek, USA Today, USA Weekend, Guideposts, In Touch magazine, Christianity Today, the Washington Post, and for National Public Radio's Weekend Edition. She's also a regular contributor to the global ministry Our Daily Bread.

Her first fiction, the Annalee Spain Mysteries, features a young Black theologian—a fan of Sherlock Holmes—solving crime in Colorado's dangerous 1920s Ku Klux Klan era. The series' debut title, All That Is Secret, won a Christy Award for first novel and was picked by NBA All-Star Stephen Curry as his Literati Book Club selection for Women's History Month in March 2022. Double the Lies, book two in the series, won a Christianity Today Book of the Year Award in 2023.

Her nonfiction books include two notable memoirs: My First White Friend: Confessions on Race, Love, and Forgiveness, a winner of the Christopher Award, and I Told the Mountain to Move: Learning to Pray So Things Change, a 2006 Book of the Year finalist in the Christianity Today magazine annual book competition.

An award-winning feature writer during her years at the Denver Post and the Scripps Howard newspaper Rocky Mountain News, Patricia joined the journalism faculty at the University of Colorado at Boulder midcareer as an associate professor where she taught undergraduate and graduate students for fifteen years before her promotion to professor emerita. Now writing full-time, she also teaches at writing conferences and workshops nationwide.

A lifelong Colorado resident, Patricia and her husband, Dan, a retired educator, live near Denver. Their extended family includes two grown daughters, a son-in-law, and five grandchildren who share their passion for movies, popcorn, college hoops, and historical dramas and mysteries on Masterpiece on PBS. Join her Readers' Circle at patriciaraybon.com and get a free copy of her prayer download, "The Busy Person's Guide to Hearing God."