J. M. Hochstetler is the author of One Holy Night, a modern-day nativity story set during the Vietnam War that retells the story of Jesus’ birth for today’s readers. Her previous books are Daughter of Liberty and Native Son, books 1 and 2 of the American Patriot Series set during the American Revolution. Book 3, Wind of the Spirit, will release in January 2009.
Hochstetler graduated from Indiana University cum laude, taking a degree in Germanic languages. In the mid 1990s, she worked for The Freedom Forum First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt University, assisting with the development and production of Freedom Speaks, a weekly television program devoted to First Amendment rights, broadcast nationally on PBS. She was subsequently an editor with Abingdon Press for twelve years before founding her own small press, Sheaf House, in 2006 to publish extraordinary fiction by fresh new voices.
Born and reared in central Indiana, the daughter of Mennonite farmers, Hochstetler currently resides near Nashville, Tennessee. Her interest in the American colonial and Revolutionary War eras grew out of the experiences of her Anabaptist ancestors who immigrated to America from Europe seeking religious freedom. With her cousin, author Bob Hostetler, she is writing a novel titled Northkill that is based on the massacre of three of their Amish Mennonite ancestors on the Pennsylvania frontier during the French and Indian War, the Indian captivity of the attack’s survivors, and their eventual return home.
