Speaker Bios

Mickey Maudlin

Michael G. Maudlin (Mickey) is senior vice president, executive editor, and the director of Bible Publishing for HarperOne, the religion and spirituality imprint of HarperCollins, where he is fortunate to work with such authors as Rob Bell, N.T. Wright, Barbara Brown Taylor, Lauren Winner, Richard Foster, Dallas Willard, Brian McLaren, and the C.S. Lewis Estate. Before coming to Harper in 2002, he served for fourteen years as both editorial vice president and managing editor of the evangelical magazine Christianity Today and earlier, for six years, as General Books Editor with InterVarsity Press. After finding God and a wife at Miami University, he went on to earn an M.A. in theology from Wheaton College. He and his wife have two daughters and split their time between Wheaton, Illinois and San Francisco, California.

Dr. Christopher Mitchell

Dr. Christopher Mitchell is director of the Wade Center and Assistant Professor of Theological Studies at Wheaton College, Illinois. He serves on the Advisory Board for the Northern Michigan C. S. Lewis Festival and is a regular guest speaker at festival events. His first lecture in 2003, delivered to a packed house at North Central Michigan College, focused on the friendship of Lewis and Tolkien. In 2004 he joined British scholar and Lewis expert, Rev. Dr. Michael Ward, for a daylong seminar at the college. In 2005 he led another daylong seminar, this time with Dr. Andrew Cuneo of Hillsdale College, addressing "The Mind Behind Narnia." In 2006 he joined the panel discussion about the forthcoming PBS documentary "Myth, Imagination, & Faith," for which he was interviewed.

Dr. Mitchell received a M.A. from Wheaton College and a Ph.D. from the University of St. Andrews, Scotland, where his concentration was Historical Theology. He serves as Book Review Editor for Seven: An Anglo-American Literary Review, a journal published annually by the Wade Center on its authors. He lectures widely on J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis as well as on the other authors of the Wade Center, which include Owen Barfield, G. K. Chesterton, George MacDonald, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Charles Williams. He has given lectures on Lewis/Tolkien/The Inklings at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland; at the Annual Tolkien Symposium; and at various colleges and universities nationwide, including Ohio State, Baylor, Brigham Young, Wayne State, Calvin College, and Wheaton College.

Dr. Mitchell has also authored several published works on Lewis, including “Bearing the Weight of Glory: The Cost of C. S. Lewis’s Witness,” in The Pilgrim’s Guide: C. S. Lewis and the Art of Witness (Eerdmans, 1998); and “University Battles: C. S. Lewis and the Oxford University Socratic Club,” in C. S. Lewis: Lightbearer in the Shadowlands (Crossway Books, 1997).

Mitchell and his wife, Julie, live in Wheaton with the two youngest of their four children.

Peter Schakel

Peter J. Schakel received his B.A. from Central College in Iowa and his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has taught at Hope College since 1969 and for almost thirty years has been the Peter C. and Emajean Cook Professor of English.

His area of scholarly specialization is British Literature 1660-1745, focusing particularly on Jonathan Swift. He has written many articles and reviews on this period and is author of The Poetry of Jonathan Swift: Allusion and the Development of a Poetic Style (University of Wisconsin Press, 1978), editor of Critical Approaches to Teaching Swift (AMS Press, 1992), and co-editor of Eighteenth-Century Contexts: Historical Inquiries in Honor of Phillip Harth (University of Wisconsin Press, 2001).

His interest in C. S. Lewis began in 1973, when he began using some of Lewis’s works in a freshman comp course. He went on to write five books on Lewis: Reading with the Heart: The Way into Narnia (1979), Reason and Imagination in C. S. Lewis: A Study of “Till We Have Faces” (1984), Imagination and the Arts in C. S. Lewis (2002), The Way into Narnia: A Reader’s Guide (2005), and Is Your Lord Large Enough? (2008). He has also edited or co-edited two books on Lewis and one on Charles Williams.

He and a colleague, Jack Ridl, have co-authored several literature textbooks, including Approaching Poetry (1997), Approaching Literature: Reading + Thinking + Writing (3rd edition, 2012) and 250 Poems: A Portable Anthology (3rd edition, 2013).

Sarah Arthur

Sarah Arthur is the bestselling author of numerous books on the intersection of faith and literature. Her award-winning youth devotional "Walking with Bilbo: A Devotional Adventure through The Hobbit" is a guide to spiritual themes in the blockbuster film "The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey" premiering this Christmas. She is a contributing writer to HarperOne's C. S. Lewis blog and served as a consultant for HarperOne's "C. S. Lewis Bible."

Along with her husband, Tom, she is a founding board member of the Northern Michigan C. S. Lewis Festival. She helped kick off events in 2004 with the joint lecture “Why Lewis?” given with friend and fellow board-member Suzanne Shumway at North Central Michigan College, and followed this in 2006 with a joint lecture on the friendship of Tolkien and Lewis, as seen through their letters.