Ann Voskamp

Ann Voskamp is a Canadian author and blogger whose 2010 memoir One Thousand Gifts turned a farmhouse blog into a publishing phenomenon. Raised and still living in North Perth, Ontario, on 600 acres her husband farms, she started her blog “A Holy Experience” to document homeschooling her seven children and, by her own account, to work through fears like agoraphobia by writing down a thousand things she was grateful for. That practice became a book. Zondervan published it in 2011, and it spent 60 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list after Kathie Lee Gifford featured it on The Today Show.

She calls herself a “wait-er” rather than a writer, someone who waits on the Lord for words, and her prose is known for an idiosyncratic style she’s dubbed “prosetry”, swapping adverbs for adjectives, dropping possessive pronouns, writing sentences like “he brushed my hand gentle.” Critics and fans argue over it, but it hasn’t slowed her down. The Broken Way followed in 2016 and WayMaker in 2022, both also New York Times bestsellers, alongside The Greatest Gift and other titles.

Voskamp’s gratitude project didn’t stay private. It spread on Twitter under the hashtag #1000gifts, and Twitter itself later took note, recruiting evangelical leaders onto the platform after discovering their posts outperformed celebrity accounts by wide margins. There’s something honest in that: a farm wife’s list of small mercies traveling further than most marketing ever could.

Beyond writing, she co-founded We Welcome Refugees and has traveled to Iraq to sit with Yazidi women who fled ISIS, work she’s tied directly to her faith’s call to hospitality. She’s partnered with Compassion International and sponsored refugee families through Canada’s private sponsorship program, and in 2017 she stood outside the National Prayer Breakfast holding a sign reading “We Welcome Refugees” before later attending the event as an invited guest.