Anna Carter Florence is the Peter Marshall Professor of Preaching at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Georgia.  She is an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church (USA) and holds degrees from Yale University and Princeton Theological Seminary (M.Div. and Ph.D.).  Before joining the Columbia faculty in 1998, Dr. Florence served as an associate pastor for youth and young adults at Westminster Presbyterian Church in Minneapolis. Her books include Preaching as Testimony, Inscribing the Word, and Rehearsing Scripture: Discovering God’s Word in Community (Eerdmans, 2018), based on her 2012 Lyman Beecher Lectures on Preaching at Yale Divinity School; her current book project is ‘A’ is for Alabaster: A Preacher’s Alphabet.  She has also published numerous articles and chapters in books and journals, including a year’s worth of lectionary text commentaries for WorkingPreacher.org.

Dr. Florence’s research focuses on testimony, preaching pedagogies, and creative strategies for communities to engage and encounter the biblical text, so she is happiest when sitting around a table with a group of people, a big passage of scripture, and a big block of time to dive into it.  She is a frequent teacher and lecturer in the U.S. and abroad.  She and her husband, the Rev. David Carter Florence, have two grown sons.  They also have two dogs, two cats, a flock of chickens, and way too much knitting yarn.