For press requests, please contact the author at cheryl@nunsunveiled.com or her publicist, Tooraj Kavoussi, at tkpublicrelations@fastmail.com or (845) 784-4721.

The author’s agent, Laura Langlie, can be reached at laura@lauralanglie.com.

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A young Protestant girl’s fascination with, and fear of, nuns, the “spooky” women of the Catholic Church, evolves into an investigative journalist’s quest to reveal the true identities behind the long, black cloaks and starched wimples in UNVEILED: THE HIDDEN LIVES OF NUNS (Berkley Trade, ISBN: 978-0425-23238-5, $14.00, March 2010). As a young girl, Cheryl Reed was taught that the Catholic Church was an evil organization. That notion was reinforced by stories from her Catholic friends and the entertainment media’s portrayal of nuns as cold and sadistic teachers. But what Reed discovered amongst this enigmatic and dwindling subculture was altogether different.

She interviewed more than three hundred different nuns of diverse beliefs and lifestyles—from cloistered women who starved and flagellated themselves to untraditional and activists who protested controversial causes and sought arrest. All in all, Reed crisscrossed the United States visiting more than fifty different women’s religious orders. Reed lived and prayed with the nuns; she observed their daily lives, and participated in silent worship. She witnessed their vow ceremonies, mourned with them, celebrated and drank beer with them. They welcomed questions no one had ever dared to ask before. Reed listened to their personal stories and candid musings about love and sex, life and death, faith and joy, and loss and regret. During her four-year journey, Reed garnered access to nuns that no other journalist had ever been granted, living and praying with nuns from coast to coast.

Her questions were aplenty: Was the sisterhood still a viable option for women in today’s society? Why would so many women still enter strict, habited orders? How could they possibly exert their own identity in a world of such conformity? Why were they so willing to give up material pleasures, money, the company of men, and sex?

The answers to these questions and many more, changed Reed’s perspective on nuns; they also changed her outlook on herself and her life. In the end the nuns that Reed approached with suspicion and curiosity ended up teaching her more about motherhood, relationships, and feminism than she ever gleaned from the outside world.

In UNVEILED, Cheryl Reed has succeeded in opening up the doors to a once closed world—one often misrepresented and almost always misunderstood—to present nuns not as stoic icons of secrecy and ritual but simply as women who have chosen an independent path, and who now offer themselves as guides to their fascinating, surprising, and enlightening interior lives.

About the Author : Cheryl L. Reed is currently senior editor for publications at the University of Chicago Medical Center where she is the managing editor for several publications, including the glossy magazine Medicine on the Midway. She is a former editorial page editor, books editor and investigative reporter at the Chicago Sun-Times and previously a staff writer at several others newspapers. Her freelance articles have appeared in U.S. News & World Report, Salon, Mother Jones, Poets & Writers and other publications.

Her stories have changed national and state laws and won numerous awards, including Harvard University’s Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting, the Investigative Reporters & Editors Award for Investigative Reporting and the Edgar A. Poe Award by the White House Correspondents' Association.

Ms. Reed is a graduate of the University of Missouri School of Journalism where she received her dual bachelor’s degrees in newswriting and photojournalism. She earned her master’s degree in journalism from Ohio State University and is currently working on a master’s of fine arts degree from Northwestern University in Chicago. Ms. Reed has taught writing workshops and has been a visiting professor.

When she is not working, Ms. Reed and her husband, Greg Stricharchuk, a business editor for the Chicago Tribune, split their time between their home on Chicago’s South Side and a farmhouse in Laporte, Indiana, where she writes in a converted barn. She is currently writing a novel set in Chicago during the recent presidential election.