Advanced Praise for THIS IS MY BODY. Releases 10.22.19 but available for pre-order now.

“There is a deep and insatiable longing at the center of Cameron Dezen Hammon’s spellbinding debut memoir: to love and be loved with honesty and abandon, to follow a spiritual path toward clarity and truth. While navigating the contradictions of faith and feminism, of doubt and desire, of the sometimes unbridgeable distance between what we believe and what we know, Hammon discovers that sometimes the crises that shake our most deeply held religious convictions are those that lead us toward what we truly believe. This Is My Body signals the arrival of an exceptional new voice.” ―Lacy M. Johnson, author of The Reckonings: Essays

“Cameron Dezen Hammon has taken on two of the greatest mysteries of life―romantic love and religious conviction―and woven them into a gripping narrative of discovery. She invites us back stage into a world some of us may not know well at all―a creative life in a church community. Her story of conversion and the many days that follow it is especially compelling in its willingness to be so honest―flaws and failures frankly explored. Her text acknowledges a reader as friend from the very beginning.” ―Naomi Shihab Nye, author Voices in the Air: Poems for Listeners

“This fearless examination of Cameron Dezen Hammon’s dark night of the soul begins with a startling moment, where death and sex and God and doubt swirl around each other. Then, word by word―slowly, beautifully, thrillingly―she circles that moment, until a hard-won mercy emerges.” ―Nick Flynn, author of The Reenactments

“Fundamentalism has a way of reducing all of life’s complexities into a rigid set of binaries―pure or impure, sinner or saint, saved or damned. In This Is My Body, writer and musician Cameron Dezen Hammon chronicles her initial love affair with the evangelical faith, her gradual discomfort with its patriarchal structures, and her brave pursuit of a more nuanced spirituality. Hammon’s prose soars as she boldly dismantles the rigid worldview that once gave her comfort and rebuilds from the ground upwards, newly committed to authenticity and truth. Unflinchingly honest and searingly lyrical, this is a song of a book.” ―Jessica Wilbanks, author of When I Spoke in Tongues

“To find answers, Hammon must find the questions. And then she must persist in asking them. What we learn from this book is that it is human to love, and it is human to need to be loved.” ―Angela Morales, author of The Girls in My Town

“With honesty and courage, Cameron Dezen Hammon confronts the personal, the spiritual, and the cultural in this stunning memoir. Written in sharp and lucid prose, Hammon explores passion, doubt, and the risks of faith. This Is My Body carries an urgency and a candor seldom seen in contemporary memoirs. In two words, Hammon’s story is beautiful and brave.” ―Mark Haber, Brazos bookseller and author of Reinhardts Garden

“When one rests in the truth of their own story, it allows all those who hear that truth to find their own rest. I rested deeply in the truth of This Is My Body. And that truth set me free.” ―Scott Erickson, author/artist of Prayer: Forty Days of Practice

ABOUT

Cameron Dezen Hammon is a writer and musician living in Houston. Her essays, poems, and stories have appeared in or are forthcoming from The Rumpus, Ecotone, The Houston Chronicle, The Butter, NYLON, The Literary Review, Brevity's Nonfiction Blog, Columbia Poetry Review, and elsewhere. Her writing has been anthologized in The Kiss: Intimacies from Writers from W.W. Norton, and My Caesarean: Twenty Mothers on the Experience of Birth by C-Section and After from The Establishment, and honored as notable in The Best American Essays 2017. She earned her MFA from Seattle Pacific University. Cameron is the host of The Ish podcast, conversations from the liminal spaces of life, and co-founder of the Houston-based literary reading series “The Slant.” Her first book, This Is My Body: A Memoir of Religious and Romantic Obsession is available for pre-order now from Lookout Books. Follow her @camerondhammon

CONTACT

Cameron Dezen Hammon

camerondezenhammon [at] gmail [dot] com

Literary Agent

Amanda Annis at Trident Media Group

aannis [at] tridentmediagroup [dot] com