About Me
Infusing Reality with Hope
Jacci's Bio for Fiction Books
Jacci lives with her husband in Nevada’s high desert. They spend their mornings hiking through the sagebrush with their dog, Rosie.
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Jacci loves chocolate, babies, and coffee with friends. She’s worn many hats in her lifetime: therapist, school counselor, campus minister, spiritual director, and mother. Her favorite hats are her writer and grandmother hats, which come in wild colors and don’t fit too tightly.
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Jacci's first fantasy for young adults is Tree Singer. It has three things she loves: trees, a good quest story, and a young girl who has to find her voice to bring her gifts to the world! Tree Singer was a Wishing Shelf Book Award finalist and has a fantastic Kirkus review. It is available on Audible with the incomparable Barbara Bond narrating.
Jacci's first book geared towards adults, The Retreat: A tale of spiritual awakening, came out on Harper One.
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Jacci's middle grade fiction, Bending Willow, is about Riley and Mia searching for a father who doesn't know they exist. It is the first book in The Finding Home Series. Bending Willow represented Nevada at the National Book Festival in Washington D.C and was a finalist for the Wishing Shelf Contest. All of Jacci’s books have spent time on the best-selling Amazon lists.
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Her YA book, Snapped, is about Snapchat gone wrong and how to stand up to cyberbullying, and her YA book, Cracker, is an alternative history and helps us understand what it is like to be a marginalized person. Both of these books were finalists in the Wishing Shelf Book Awards
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All of Jacci's books were gifted by a patron to the Washoe County School libraries!
Jacci's bio for her Non-fiction
For more than forty years, Jacci Turner enjoyed working in various Christian ministries. But when she opened her heart to the LGBTQIA community, the doors to ministry were closed shut on her. The church’s reaction to her advocacy for the rainbow community initially confused and saddened her. But this break with the church opened new doors and Jacci eventually discovered a broader, transformative view of God and faith.
Through Spiritual Direction and contemplative prayer practices, Jacci has found a big, wonderful community of people seeking a strong connection with the divine outside traditional organized religion. Her goal in writing this book is to encourage those struggling through a faith transition. She wants them to understand they are not alone, and that there is hope, life, and joy on the other side of this sometimes difficult journey.
Jacci now serves as the director of Christian Formation and Direction Ministry in Nevada where she trains spiritual directors and helps others in their faith formation. She also shares simple spiritual practices on her blog, “Spiritual Practices 101,” and enjoys tackling tough social issues in a hopeful way in the books she writes for teens and children.