Barbara Mahany spent nearly three decades as a reporter and writer at the Chicago Tribune. She is now a freelance journalist and author of four collections of essays. Her first, Slowing Time: Seeing the Sacred Outside Your Kitchen Door, has been called “balm for the hurried heart,” and “a field guide into your holiest hours.” Her second book, Motherprayer: Lessons in Loving, explores the sacred mysteries of mothering—its sorrows, joys, trembles, hallelujahs, and the tumble of questions without answers.

Her latest, which debuted earlier this autumn, The Stillness of Winter: Sacred Blessings of the Season, is a "gift book," which basically means a pretty little book you might delight in holding in your hand, or tucking in your pocket, or slipping onto your bedside table. It's a lovely, fetchingly-compact tome and we have done just that with it in Bellingham and Laguna Beach, respectively.

A pediatric oncology nurse before taking up journalism, Barb ever is been drawn to deeply human stories, where she has displayed a nurse’s knack for tapping into the hearts of those whose story she is telling. She counts among her life’s treasures the hundreds of letters she’s received from readers who tell her they’ve clipped one of her stories and tucked it in a wallet, a bedroom drawer, or slipped it in a plastic sleeve and carried it wherever they’ve gone. One such fellow, the Pigeon Man of Lincoln Square, who was struck and killed by a hit-and-run driver one cold December’s eve, died clutching a laminated copy of the story she had written about him three years earlier.

Barb still writes regularly on her longtime blog, Pull Up A Chair. We suggest you do.

Website: BarbaraMahany.com
Instagram: @barbara.ann.mahany
Twitter: @BarbaraMahany