Hello! I’m Bonnie Smith Whitehouse, a Nashville-based professor and writer. I call myself a pilgrim not only because I love to walk, wander, and contemplate, but because when I read Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek way back at the age of sixteen, my life was forever changed.

I’m a pilgrim who believes in crossing borders with my writing and teaching. I especially love to trespass across: 

• the territorial lines we’ve drawn around areas of knowledge

• the categories we’ve used to designate human beings as “creative” or “not-creative”

• the barriers we’ve established between the brain and the body.

I’m a Professor of English at Belmont University, where I have gladly and gratefully taught for over fifteen years. My dream is to write words, sentences, paragraphs, and books that do something good in and for the world. 

I’m also a lover of birdsong, a baker of bread, an amateur painter and hand-letterer, a mother of spirited boys, and the wife of the sweetest husband in the cosmos. I go to bed every night thinking about my morning coffee.