From St. Kitts
to Georgia's Red Clay

Born on St. Kitts — one of the smallest islands in the Western Hemisphere at just 68 square miles — Dr. Arnold O. Thompson grew up in a culture where wisdom was not merely studied but lived. As teenagers, they would go to evening service and then decide to walk around the entire island, making it back before the morning sun in time to get ready for school. Because the island was too small for a college at the time, parents and schoolteachers focused on teaching children more about life itself. They taught topics that seem strange in today's world — such as "what it is to be a man, or a gentleman" and "what it is to be a lady." The most effective method they used was storytelling with great moral or character-building precepts attached to it. Teaching wisdom through proverbs and sayings was of great importance and influence on Dr. Thompson, and he has included many such examples in his books. This tradition of teaching wisdom — not just knowledge — was a core influence on his writing.

Those roots carried him far: to Moody Seminary in Chicago, to Florida Atlantic University, to a pulpit in South Florida, to South Beach as a fashion and celebrity photographer — where he photographed some of the world's most famous and powerful people, including four U.S. Presidents — and eventually to a farm in Oxford, Georgia, where he currently lives in a camper and rises each morning to write for five hours, making up, he says, for forty years lost to discouragement and grief.

For forty years, a manuscript sat in a drawer — nearly published by Moody Press, turned away in part due to the publishing world's bias against Black authors in the late 1970s. It was his wife of thirty-eight years who helped type and edit those early pages. When she was diagnosed with stage-four brain cancer during what was supposed to be a routine hospital visit — given six months to live, surviving eight — and passed, his world was shattered. He cried every day and feared the grief would never end. In that season of deep sorrow, he went to his brother — a fellow minister — for counsel. His brother asked a surprising question: "What were you doing when you met your wife?" Dr. Thompson told him he was writing a book for Moody Press, and that she had been helping him type and edit it. His brother gave him only four words: "Get back to it."

Nine books later, Dr. Thompson writes with the same zeal and passion. The tears have not completely disappeared — they now fall more quietly within him. He is, in many ways, making up for 40 lost years. He lives now on Angel Farm in Oxford, Georgia, where he is also designing and building his home, Angel Farm House. He holds Florida State licenses as a General Contractor, Roofing Contractor, and AC Contractor. And certain trees on the property, he says, seem inclined to share their wisdom.