Interview: Dr. Jessica Hooten Wilson

In this special episode, Forefront director Nate Mancini talks to professor, author and speaker Dr. Jessica Hooten Wilson. This episode was recorded with a live studio audience at the Imagination Redeemed conference in Colorado Springs. In the first half we discuss which of today’s authors give Jessica hope for the future of fiction literature, how artists should read books differently from others, how to build an online presence without losing your soul, and of course, how our faith drives us to excellence in the arts. The second half features virtual audience questions from authors such as Dr. Russell Moore, Dr. Karen Swallow Prior, Dr. Benjamin Myers, and Dr. Ralph C. Wood.

Jessica Hooten Wilson is the Louise Cowan Scholar in Residence at the University of Dallas. She is the author of Giving the Devil his Due: Flannery O’Connor and The Brothers Karamazov, which received a 2018 Christianity Today Book of the Year Award in the Culture & the Arts; as well as two books on Walker Percy: The Search for Influence: Walker Percy and Fyodor Dostoevsky (Ohio State University Press, 2017) and Reading Walker Percy’s Novels (Louisiana State University Press, 2018); most recently she co-edited Solzhenitsyn and American Culture: The Russian Soul in the West(University of Notre Dame Press, 2020). She has received numerous fellowships, grants, and awards, including a Fulbright Fellowship to the Czech Republic, an NEH grant to study Dante in Florence in 2014, and the Biola Center for Christian Thought sabbatical fellowship.  In 2018 she received the Emerging Public Intellectual Award given by a coalition of North American think tanks in collaboration with the Centre for Christian Scholarship at Redeemer University College, and in 2019 she received the Hiett Prize in Humanities from The Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture.

Jessica has two books releasing in 2022, which you can preorder today: The Scandal of Holiness: Renewing Your Imagination in the Company of Literary Saints and Learning the Good Life: Wisdom from the Great Hearts and Minds that Came Before.