Leslie Leyland Fields is an award-winning author of eight books, a regular columnist and contributor to Christianity Today, and a commercial fisherwoman and mother of six children who lives on Kodiak Island, Alaska. She and her husband Duncan have been married 33 years.

Her speaking is enlivened by her uncommon life, a life that began in hardship and poverty in rural New Hampshire and went on to include three graduate degrees, and a life of adventure in both academia and Alaska. Her first ten years of marriage were spent in the Alaska bush, in graduate school, and backpacking through Asia and Africa. Near the end of those years, it was somewhere in the interior of Africa, while lurching through the rainforest, that Leslie and Duncan decided it was soon time to begin another kind of adventure---parenting. In the span of fifteen years, a daughter and five sons arrived, who range in age now from 22 to 8. Every summer, the entire family dons raingear and heads out onto the ocean, working intensively in their family’s commercial salmon fishing operation, begun in 1961.

While based in Kodiak, Leslie travels often to speak at conferences, churches, universities and seminars around the country on matters of family, culture, literature, food and theology.

Leslie has been a vocal defender of the family and has written two cover stories for Christianity Today on the declining value on children in our culture and the myth of the perfect parent. As a result of these articles, she has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Times, The Wall Street Journal and other publications. Her books have been featured on more than 80 radio shows, including Focus on the Family, Family Life Today, Prime Time America and many others.

She is the author/editor of eight books including Parenting is Your Highest Calling .. and Eight Other Myths that Trap Us in Worry and Guilt, Surprise Child: Finding Hope in Unexpected Pregnancy, Surviving the Island of Grace: A Life on the Wild Edge of America, and her most recent, the award-winning The Spirit of Food: 34 Writers on Feasting and Fasting Toward God.

Faith & Religion, College, For Christian and Faith based events, Family & Parenting, Marriage, Relationships, Partnerships, Sex & Relationships, Women, Christian Women, Female Leadership,