Religion publishers and academic press editors say today’s memoirs and biographies can’t be simple stories sprinkled with lessons drawn from faith and spirituality. The modern religious memoir has a job to do, ideas to propound, messages to deliver, and people to inspire.

Derek Reed, VP and editorial director for the Harmony and Convergent imprints at PRH, says he looks for books that work on multiple levels. “A memoir needs to have a small story: the author’s unique experience that you know is irreplicable,” he says. “And then it needs to have a big story: What does that experience illuminate about our lives individually, collectively? It has to address something that has stakes for readers.”

As an example, Reed highlights historian Jemar Tisby’s Notes from an Evangelical Reject: How America’s Largest Religious Movement Was Consumed by White Christian Nationalism (Convergent, Jan. 2027). The book weaves Tisby’s journey as a Black man reared in evangelicalism—he was confronted with institutional racism in white churches, schools, and seminaries—into a critical examination of white evangelicalism and the drive for secular power.

While religious memoirs may aim to elucidate and inspire, today’s readers are more skeptical than ever, according to Eerdmans acquiring editor Kimberly Benedict. “The average person looks out on our public landscape today,” she says, “and asks, which of the people who identify themselves as faith driven or living by religious principles is translating that into constructive public action.” With state and congressional elections only a few months away and a presidential race looming, readers have their choice from a host of memoirs by ambitious politicians who cite how the Bible and the church inspired them, perhaps transformed them, and may empower them.

Among those books is Go and Do Likewise: How We Heal a Broken Country (St. Martin’s, Sept.) by Kentucky governor (and 2028 presidential hopeful) Andy Beshear. He takes his title from Jesus’s parable of the Good Samaritan and, according to the publisher, looks to reclaim “faith as a force for good in the age of Trump.”

Also from St. Martin’s is Unapologetic: Clarity and Conviction in a World Gone Crazy (Nov.) by Arkansas governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who is running for reelection this fall. The book explores how her Baptist faith sustained her through years of public service and a cancer diagnosis.

And for readers who find the current polarized political landscape too distressing, Benedict points to two biographies from Eerdmans that she says offer “a way of looking back in order to think how to move forward and not despair.” With A Voice in the Wilderness: The Principled Politics of Mark Hatfield (Apr. 2027), Dartmouth history of religion professor Randall Balmer explores the life of Mark Hatfield, a Republican senator from Oregon, who, Benedict says, “was a public figure whose faith empowered him to make decisions that sometimes aligned with his party and other times his conscience took him in a different direction.” And in Rooting Out Injustice, First in Ourselves: The Faith and Practice of Bayard Rustin (Feb. 2027), Sarah Azaransky, a professor of social ethics at Union Theological Seminary, credit’s political activist Bayard Rustin’s Quaker commitment to nonviolence with shaping tactics in the civil rights movement as well as in campaigns for peace and economic justice.

Real People, Real Stories

While religious memoirs from celebrities and politicians are strong sellers, some readers prefer stories about everyday people—but those books need to pack a powerful punch, according to Cindy Spiegel, cofounder and co-CEO of Spiegel & Grau. “Memoirs can’t just be a great personal story with twists and turns unless you’re a celebrity and people are interested in you,” she says.

Spiegel highlights This Is What Happens When Women Read (Oct.) by Julianna Glasse, who grew up a devout pastor’s daughter and tried for years to be a biblically submissive wife. But then Glasse started reading beyond the Bible. And when her husband found her secret stash of Plato and Emerson, he denounced her, shouting, “This is what happens when women read.” The marriage was soon over. In her memoir, Glasse describes that confrontation as the moment “I decided to claim my right to spiritual and intellectual autonomy.”

And in Thirsty for a Miracle: They Needed Clean Water. He Needed True Purpose. An Inspiring Story of Hope and Transformation (Tyndale Refresh, Sept.), Greg Allgood explores how he felt a spiritual call to leave a corporate career to devote his talents to bringing clean water to people in need with World Vision, a Christian relief and development organization.

“It’s an evangelical memoir,” says Tyndale associate publisher Jon Farrar. “It’s here to tell you something about God and something about what you can do with God—about a transformative experience in life. People want to be immersed into a story. That’s why they turn to a book, not just scrolling online or going to ChatGPT and getting five points to make their life better.”

In their search for inspirational and important stories, acquiring editors at religion publishers are also looking to the legacies of little-known and long-forgotten people—and even offering fresh perspectives on famous folk. To that end, University of Pennsylvania Press will publish American Preacher: The Life and Times of the Eccentric Lorenzo Dow (Nov.) by Seth Perry, a professor of religion at Princeton. The biography explores the life of Lorenzo Dow, a famous minister in the early 19th century, who roamed the country insisting
people must be saved. According to senior editor Elisabeth Maselli, Dow’s legacy of evangelizing is seen today in “the brand of emotional, populist Protestantism that saturates 21st-century American politics and culture.”

In October, Catapult will posthumously publish Dutch poet and novelist Lieke Marsman’s On Another Planet They Can Save Me. The memoir, translated by Sophie Collins, explores the life of a secular person drawn to spiritual exploration. When Marsman, a former poet laureate of the Netherlands, was diagnosed with terminal bone cancer, she turned to theology and philosophy in a quest for hope. “Living for years with death challenged the limits of the rational, secular worldview she once trusted,” says Kendall Storey, editor-in-chief at Catapult. “All of this is an exploration of the possibility that meaning might lie outside the boundaries of what we know.”

And from Penguin Press comes Little Richard’s Witness: Liner Notes on Black Religion and Sexuality (Feb. 2027) by Ahmad Greene-Hayes, a professor of African American religious studies at Harvard Divinity School. The book takes readers into Greene-Hayes’s struggle to synthesize his passion for music, his Christian faith, and his queer identity via an exploration of the life of Little Richard, who had a fluid relationship with his sexuality and made music history by bringing Black gospel traditions to rock ’n’ roll.

Richard spent his life veering between selling records and selling Bibles, between performing extravagantly and preaching a very conservative Christian faith that damns homosexuality. Acquisitions editor Helen Rouner says Greene-Hayes sees many parallels between himself and Richard. “He was also brought up in a Black church tradition that did not make room for his queerness and that punished him for it,” Rouner says. “Being caught between your faith and the way you are passionate about living or working may be something familiar to many people.”

The editors PW spoke with say religious memoirs and biographies are increasingly breaking boundaries—in both form and substance—while still delivering on their fundamental promise: informing, enriching, inspiring, and even provoking readers.

Read more from our religion & spirituality books feature.

Jemar Tisby’s Memoir Is a Warning