J. M. Hochstetler
An award-winning author and editor, Joan M. Hochstetler is the daughter of Mennonite farmers. She grew up in central Indiana and graduated from Indiana University cum laude with a degree in Germanic Languages. Her contemporary novel One Holy Night was the Christian Small Publishers 2009 Book of the Year and a finalist for the American Christian Fiction Writers 2009 Carol Award. She is a member of American Christian Fiction Writers, Colonial America Christian Writers, and Middle Tennessee Christian Writers and contributes to the Colonial Quills and Novel Pastimes blogs.
In her everyday persona as Joan Shoup, she is the publisher and editorial director of Sheaf House Publishers, a specialty small press headquartered in the Elkhart, Indiana, area. In the mid 1990s, she was assistant editor for the General Conference of The United Methodist Church, then served as an editor with Abingdon Press for many years. Before that she was executive assistant at the Freedom Forum First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt University and an assistant producer on Freedom Speaks, a weekly TV program on First Amendment rights broadcast nationally on PBS.
Joan enjoys spending time with her husband, a retired United Methodist pastor, and with her children and grandchildren; gardening; crafts; traveling; researching her latest projects; and, of course, writing. She recently discovered a new passion in reenacting. An avid reader and lifelong student of history, she is especially fond of historical texts, biographies, and novels of adventure, intrigue, and romance. She is not, however, especially fond of school textbooks on history . . .
