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J. Dana Trent | Author + Prof

@jdanatrent

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💻 Writer
📚 BETWEEN TWO TRAILERS
🍎 @waketechcc
📺 Media inquiries: [email protected]
💫 PEOPLE mag exclusive

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2 years ago

Between Two Trailers is launched to a SOLD OUT crowd in Raleigh @quailridgebooks.

Writing a book is done in such isolation. Publishing a book is done and such community. Thank you, community, for your care.

Every corner of my life (@waketechcc @ymcatriangle publishing, church, lifelong friends, writerly friends) collided last night in the beautiful alchemy of life. I feel so loved and connected and encouragedI feel like I belong. I feel like I’m home.

Y’all made that happen. Thanks especially to @quailridgebooks and BBT for being the best hosts and conversation partners ever. Thank you Raleigh for coming out to support this local author. Thank you.

I only cried a few times. In public, of course. 😆

Now, baby book, go out and find your readers. They need you as much as I did. taken in Quail Ridge Books by @jdanatrent

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2 years ago

Well, goodness I believe I have lived to be 44, and I am more extra than ever. by @jdanatrent

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2 years ago

Fred and I took two road trips this summer that we’d wanted to take for years. One south, to see the side of my family that loves corn fields and street festivals. One north, to see the side that loves scenic hikes and bustling cities.

Neither trip was urgent. That’s what made them special. It’s also why road trips like that sometimes never happen. There’s always next summer. There’s always a better time to drive fourteen hours.

We put 2,200 miles on the car in a week.

Nobody on either end of that near-oil-change-level mileage needed me to be their minister or their bossy teacher. I sat, I ate, I cussed at baseball games. I listened to stories I’d never heard. I let somebody else say grace.

I have spent fifteen years teaching other people how to be present, and somewhere in the middle of it I quit being present myself. The spiritual practice of presence is always the first thing to go.

We went. That’s the whole lesson.

The official start to fall is here (it feels like it today down here in the south). And I knows autumn because my Yankees have nearly wrapped six months of baseball and secured their place in the post-season. Plus, the leaves are falling.

What did you learn this summer? There had to have been a lesson in the air conditioning somewhere. Tell me. by @jdanatrent

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23 days ago

Two weeks ago, I started my sixteenth academic year teaching. I have worn first-day-of-school-dress for all 16 school years.

Over 200 new students walk into my world religions and critical thinking classes every semester (seated and online). Some are there out of real curiosity. Some are there because it fit their schedule. Some are there because they heard I’m an easy A. I accept all three premises.

What happens over their semester is the same every time and I have never gotten tired of it. They arrive certain that religion is something other people do. They encounter a bigger world. There’s awe, then friction, then resistance, then fascination, then something that looks a lot like relief.

And somewhere in the middle of every single semester, someone raises a hand and asks the question they have been carrying since before they had words for it. Usually carefully, like there’s a correct answer and they might lose points for guessing wrong.

Sixteen years in, I still don’t know which student it’s going to be. That’s the part that keeps me in the room.

What do you remember about the first day of school?

Photo credits: Fred Eaker (first-day-of-school-dress 2026); Yonat Shimron, Religion News Service, 2020, article on world religions and death rituals in the classroom ("This teacher is on a mission to discuss death. J. Dana Trent wants to reframe discussions of mortality for the post-millennial generation, by Yonat Shimron, Religion News Service, Feb. 4, 2020) by @jdanatrent

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2 months ago

Before we did anything else, everybody picked up a rock and wrote one word on it.
A breath word. A name for God. Peace. Enough. Whatever came.

This was the first weekend of August at First Christian Church in Athens, Georgia, hosted by Rev. Elizabeth Hagan. It was an intergenerational VBS, and not in the old-school sense of a children’s program with adults supervising.

Picture this: Great-grandparents and grandparents and neighbors and third-graders sitting together at the same table talking Nee-Doh squisshy toys. New retirees navigated new lives. UGA faculty dreading the school year. Eager elementary school kids wondering if their teachers would be nice.

But that Saturday night at the beginning of August we learned to breathe. Sunday morning, four generations read scripture together the slow way, by listening.

What I taught everyone gathered is that the rocks they were holding were very old technology. Desert monastics counted psalms on stones and knotted cords. In Numbers, God tells the Israelites to look at the fringe on their clothes so they’ll remember. Orthodox Christians call objects like these windows to God.

Nobody in that room needed an app. They needed something with the weight of the earth in their palm and one word on it.

There are people right now selling luddite merch on Instagram, returning to paper planners, cracking open musty books from Granny’s basement. People of all ages trying to get out of their own heads and back into their five senses and a room with other people.

These rocks are the thousand-year-old version of that.
Mine is on my desk. I’m looking at it right now. It says Grow(ing). by @jdanatrent

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2 months ago

My literary agent just sold my next book.

I won't say much, because it isn't written yet. It's due this winter to my publisher, W. W. Norton, who published the infamous Fight Club. That is my favorite way to describe their work.

Here's the premise, because I think some of you have been living inside it for years. I know I have.

It's spiritual procrastination: the prayer you keep meaning to return to. The meditation practice you'll start when the grief softens, when the kids' schedules settle, or when you feel worthy. We don't abandon these things on purpose. We defer them, for reasons that are genuinely good, until the day we need them and reach for our phones instead.

It's a book for people who want a sustainable spiritual practice and never quite get around to it.

It's also for people who never had a practice to defer. Maybe you were raised by parents who had already left church. Maybe you left so long ago the building feels like someone else's locked door. Maybe you've decided spiritual practice requires a childhood you didn't get. It doesn't.

It will not be a scolding manual. It's a permission slip with teeth.

Countryman Press, edited by Emma Peters, sold by Mark Tauber at The Watermark Agency. My seventh book since 2013.

I said in my newsletter I'd bring you along for the process. This is me starting.
Questions, sneak previews, the whole mess. It'll be here. by @jdanatrent

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2 months ago

From the Vegas strip to Kenny Chesney at the Sphere—we proved we can still close down the town when we want to! 😉 taken in Las Vegas, Nevada by @jdanatrent

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3 months ago

These days I’m all about imperfect practices. So if your soul (like mine) is looking for a gentle, grounded place to land amid chaos or listlessness, I recommend Praying with Jonah by @bellyofthewhaleministries

I had the honor of reading an advanced copy, it is a joy to finally hold the official book in my hands.

Sharon has mapped out for imperfect pilgrims—aka all of us.

Join me in celebrating her work. Order it at your fave indie book store. Link in story. by @jdanatrent

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4 months ago

Sunday morning quiet. ☕️
For many, today is a straightforward celebration. For others, it’s a complicated walk through memory, grief, and the heavy spaces left behind by fathers who fought battles we didn’t fully understand until much later. If today feels less like a holiday and more like a reckoning with the past—with the hard histories and the fragile pieces of a parent’s hidden story—may you find a moment of stillness. May we breathe out the weight of what was broken, and breathe in the grace of survival. Peace to the complex stories, the hard-won healing, and the quiet spaces we carve out for ourselves this Sabbath.
#SundaySabbath #FathersDay by @jdanatrent

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4 months ago

Who's the complicated father in your story?

For me, he was the most dangerous man in our county. He was also the most charismatic. He was also my father.

Everyone called him "The King." That's what everyone in Vermillion County, Indiana called my father, mostly because of the way he captivated a room, but also because of what he was capable of. King could be charismatic and terrifying in the same breath. He had the skills to smooth over an escalating situation with his wit and ruthlessly kill a Colonel's horse. King loved me in a way that was very real and also, for most of my childhood, completely wild.

When he died, we found his medical records in a kitchen cabinet in his trailer. Schizophrenia. Schizoaffective disorder. Diagnoses everyone was scared to say out loud while I was growing up. The man who terrified Vermillion County for 60 years had spent his last few years quietly medicated, finally, for an illness no one treated until it was almost too late.

This Father's Day, I'm thinking about the fathers who never got help. June is Men's Mental Health Awareness Month. The Monday after Father's Day is recognized internationally as a day to talk about it.

If you had a complicated father—wild, absent, emotionally unavailable, impossibly frustrating, numb, or terrifying—you're allowed to hold many things at once. You can miss him. You can be honest about him. You can give him space to be honest about his own experiences.

That's the point of my memoir, Between Two Trailers: None of our parents' stories are cut-and-dry. No one is strictly "good or evil." No human experience is without nuance.

Complicated families are universal. It's the thread that we recognize in one another when we start telling the truth about these wild folks we grew up with and the gifts they gave us.

The messy inheritance is that we get to choose to keep what has shaped us well, and what we need to let go of.

Link in bio if you want the rest of the Between Two Trailers story.

Who's the complicated father figure in yours? Tell me in the comments.

#BetweenTwoTrailers #FathersDay #MensMentalHealthMonth by @jdanatrent

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4 months ago

Right back where we started from! Signing this morning @quailridgebooks and celebrating two years since the release or Between Two Trailers! #memoir @randomhouse @thewatermarkagency taken in Quail Ridge Books by @jdanatrent

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6 months ago