Lynn Casteel Harper is an essayist, minister, and chaplain. Her debut book, On Vanishing: Mortality, Dementia, and What It Means to Disappear (Catapult, 2020), was named a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and a Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle selection for 2021. On Vanishing appeared on the Gold Foundation’s 2021 Reading List for Compassionate Clinicians. 

Lynn’s essays and interviews have appeared in The New York Times, Kenyon Review Online, Salon, The Paris Review, North American Review, The Christian Science Monitor, NPR’s Think, The Sun Magazine, and elsewhere. She is a Barbara Deming Memorial Fund grant recipient and the winner of the 2017 Orison Anthology Award in Nonfiction.

A graduate of Wake Forest University Divinity School and Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital’s chaplain residency program, Lynn has served as the Minister of Older Adults at The Riverside Church in the City of New York and as a nursing home chaplain. An ordained Baptist minister (Alliance of Baptists), Lynn lives and writes in Bridgeport, Connecticut, where she is the pastor of Olivet Congregational Church UCC.