To celebrate the launch of Eerdmans’ new Here Below Books imprint, PW spoke to editorial director Lisa Ann Cockrel about the new effort, which describes itself as a home for ambitious literature about the “subversive work of being human.”

Can you define what Here Below represents?

Here Below reps the reality that the sacred and the profane have an intimate relationship. In publishing, they’ve been forcibly divorced so that books can be clearly legible as “religious” or “general trade.” That distinction drives a great deal of revenue, especially on the religious side of the market, and it serves plenty of projects and readers well. But it doesn’t serve so many of the writers and readers I’ve met in twenty-plus years in this business. It doesn’t reflect the many facets of their doubts and devotions, or the full stakes of the questions they’re circling. Here Below is an effort to combine the best of faith-based publishing—fluency in the world’s great religious traditions, including agnosticism—with the best of literary publishing: a love of literary art and the freedom to provoke. We’re a literary press that’s fluent in theology.

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What if the writing life isn’t about daily word counts—but about daily attention to your whole self?

You don’t need to write every day to be a writer. You don’t need perfect conditions, endless hours, or a life free from doubt. What you need is permission to bring your whole, imperfect self to the page—and practices that nourish your soul as you write.

All of life is the writing life.

Drawing on her experience as a spiritual director working primarily with writers, Charlotte Donlon offers something rare: a book that honors both the craft of writing and the care of the soul. Through contemplative practices, personal stories, and wisdom from writers like Toni Morrison, Margaret Walker, and Kaveh Akbar, she invites you to discover how rest, doubt, grief, and joy all become sacred ground for creative flourishing.

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Between the Light and Me is one veteran’s stirring exploration of the ways in which darkness and light bleed together in both the world and the human heart.

Just one month before September 11, Kathleen Kilcup enlisted in the US Army with all the fervent idealism of an untested teenager. Between the Light and Me is her unflinching account of encountering violence—both in the military and beyond—and a desperate, sometimes ill-conceived search for God that sustained her through addiction and trauma, on the long road to true freedom.

Tracing her singular path from a juvenile detention center in Utah to linguistic training in California, from a wildland firefighter crew in Tahoe to a lavender farm in Oregon, Kilcup explores the entanglement of violence and beauty in her own life as she hungered for something genuine while starving herself and getting blackout drunk. “I wanted something real and painful and beautiful, the mystery underneath the mystery. I wanted the truth,” she writes.

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To live meaningfully in a digital age, we must reckon with impermanence.

There’s rot in the foundation of the web. A cherished blog vanishes while an adolescent fan page refuses to stay deleted. Supreme Court citations disappear while AI-generated spam grows like weeds, feeding ever-more-ravenous algorithms. The “cloud” shrouds the messy reality of our digital lives: We will die, and so will everything we make.

In The Internet Will Die, and So Will You, Pulitzer-winning journalist and technologist John West blends incisive reporting, cultural critique, and philosophical meditation to reveal how we arrived at this uncanny moment—following tunnel fires to link rot and tracing defunct anime tributes to large language models. Drawing on Mary Oliver and John Green, Bach cantatas and TikTok memes, Ecclesiastes and Instagram captions, West charts a path forward. We can reclaim depth over breadth, the sabbath over the scroll, and the agency to remember and forget on our own terms.

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What if reading poetry could change you—not just what you think, but how you move through the world?

For forty years, Thomas Gardner led students through this transformative act—not analyzing poems from a distance but reperforming them from the inside. Walking together through Elizabeth Bishop’s broken beaches, Robert Frost’s snowy woods, and Emily Dickinson’s rooms of possibility, they discovered that getting lost is how we are found. That acknowledging fragility opens eyes to wonder. That poems, like parables, ask us not to produce definitive explanations but to keep up.

A Place of Encounter is Gardner’s luminous record of this work. Through fifty short lyric essays moving between memory, close reading, and theological reflection, he opens up the inner drama of poems as spiritual exercises—spaces where, as Dickinson puts it, our narrow hands are forced wide to gather paradise. With the grace and precision of the poems he loves, Gardner shows how deep reading grooves interior change.

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Shattered asks whether we can break cycles we never chose to enter—and what it costs to finally see our parents clearly.

In this luminous meditation on inheritance and memory, Boers excavates what it means to be the son of Dutch Calvinist immigrants who carried more than belongings across the Atlantic. His father survived Nazi occupation and brutal combat in Indonesia, then built a thriving business building greenhouses in Ontario—but never escaped the rage passed down from his own father. Glass became the family trade and its central metaphor: fragile, transparent, dangerous, a substance that refracts light and cuts deep.

With a poet’s precision and a theologian’s discernment, Boers weaves together family photographs, cultural history, and the doctrines of covenant and predestination that shaped his world. He traces how trauma replicates itself across generations, how children can become unwitting rescuers, and how the Calvinist emphasis on discipline and silence around feelings created a pressure bound to explode somewhere.

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An essential story for understanding what’s at stake when women’s rights are stripped away.

Cait West was five years old the first time she was told her swimsuit was too revealing. By the time she turned eighteen, the rules in her home were ironclad: no college, no career, no choices of her own. As a stay-at-home daughter in the Christian patriarchy movement, she was trained for one purpose—to serve the man her father would eventually allow her to marry. She learned to cook, to clean, to disappear. She learned that her body was a threat and freedom was sin. Her life would never be her own.

Until she broke free.

Rift tells a true story of gender oppression—one that many American women are experiencing now behind closed doors at home and at church. Weaving together her own gripping story with lyrical meditations on the geology of displacement and fracture, West maps the fault lines of her own breaking: the isolation that kept her silent, the forbidden relationship that became her escape route, and the complex aftermath of choosing herself over everything she’d been taught to believe.

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Here Below Books: books for the subversive work of being human.

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Get grounded in your summer reading with a bundle of Here Below books that keep you alive to the mysteries of the material world.

Here Below publishes books that reward attention and aim to build conversations—across belief, experience, and time. Join the press in the subversive, sustaining work of being human.

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An imprint of Eerdmans Publishing, Here Below is launching its inaugural list in Fall 2026. Here Below produces beautiful titles that explore what it means to be human today. Here Below serves spiritual and cultural wayfarers who crave ambitious literature that offers depth and thought-provoking insights. For more information, visit herebelowbooks.com.

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