praise for THIS IS MY BODY

Nonfiction Discovery Prize Winner, Writers League of Texas Book Awards

Bronze Medal in Creative Nonfiction, Independent Publisher Book Awards 2020

Finalist, Foreward INDIE Book of the Year Award in Autobiography and Memoir

One of five great indie press books from 2019, Book Riot

One of the Rumpus’s best books of 2019

Recommended by Brené Brown in her 2019 roundup of Fall Book Love

One of Book Riot’s Five Best Indie Press Books of 2019

“A generous and unflinchingly brave memoir about faith, feminism, and freedom.” ―Read the full review from KIRKUS HERE.

“Hammon’s candid exploration of how megachurch worship culture objectifies women will stun and move both Christian and general readers alike.” ―Read the full review from Publisher’s Weekly HERE.

“…a moving, valuable look at the social structures of evangelical Christianity, the treatment of women artists, and the challenge of remaining present in a marriage.” ―Read the review from Foreword Reviews HERE.

“Hammon’s strikingly contemporary reflections about her treatment in conservative churches . . . make her story a particularly salient one for this particular moment. . . . It is [her] longing for participation, for membership that animates Hammon’s search for a faith community and that will affirm her call to ministry—not despite her gender, her talents, and her flaws, but because of them.” ―Read the review by Martha Park at The Millions.

“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 the author of This Is My Body: A Memoir of Religious and Romantic Obsession (Lookout Books), the Nonfiction Discovery Prize Winner for the 2019 Writers’ League of Texas Book Awards. This Is My Body earned a Bronze Medal in Creative Nonfiction from the Independent Publisher Book Awards, 2020, and was a finalist for the Foreward INDIE Book of the Year Award in Autobiography and Memoir. Kirkus called This Is My Body "a generous and unflinchingly brave memoir about faith, feminism, and freedom.” Cameron's nonfiction has appeared in The Kiss anthology (W.W. Norton), Vogue, Guernica, Ecotone, and elsewhere; and her essay “Infirmary Music” was named a notable in The Best American Essays 2017. She earned her MFA from Seattle Pacific University and has taught creative writing at Rice University, where she is a lecturer, as well as workshops at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington, Duke Divinity, Writers in the Schools Houston, Inprint Houston, and Hugo House. She is at work on a nonfiction book about women and witchcraft.