Anne Bokma is an award-winning freelance journalist and the author of My Year of Living Spiritually: From Woo-Woo to Wonderful—One Woman's Secular Quest for a More Soulful Life published by Douglas & McIntyre in October 2019.

As a journalist, she has reported on the legal challenges of the Sixties Scoop, interviewed tiny house dwellers who have said goodbye to mortgage payments, gone undercover in a popular Toronto sex club, written about how she found a brother she never knew she had, and how she finally learned to stop being a helicopter mom.

As a travel writer, she's gone swimming in Thoreau's iconic Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts, tried out living at North American's oldest commune in Virginia, talked with the dead at the psychic town of Lily Dale in New York State, and biked around Schiermonnikoog, a quirky island with a notorious past in the northern Netherlands.

A leading expert on North America's 80-million strong "spiritual-but-not-religious" demographic, Anne was the award-winning "Spiritual But Secular" columnist for the United Church Observer (now Broadview) for four years before writing her popular My Year of Living Spiritually blog for the magazine.

Anne also leads workshops and gives presentations on topics relating to spirituality and writing, including how she left a fundamentalist religion, the importance of finding community, how to live a more soulful life, and what it takes to tell a good story. She is the founder of the 6-Minute Memoir “Speed Storytelling For a Cause” event, which features storytellers sharing tales on a common theme within a strict six-minute time limit. The event has raised more than $45,000 for local charities in her hometown of Hamilton, Ontario, since 2013.

Her work has been honored with awards from the Canadian Association of Journalists, the North American Travel Journalists Association, the Canadian Church Press, the U.S. Associated Church Press, the Canadian Society of Magazine Editors, the Canadian Business Press Media Association, Rogers Media, the Travel Media Association of Canada and the Hamilton Independent Media Awards. In 2020, she received a City of Hamilton’s Arts Award for her work as a writer.

Anne is the mother of two grown daughters and makes her home in Hamilton, Ontario, where she is an active member of First Unitarian Church.