Words. Music. Faith. Life.
Tim Craven was born in McKeesport, Pennsylvania in 1951. He graduated from Penn State University in 1974 with a degree in Creative Writing. A songwriter, musician, and ordained Lutheran pastor, Tim's life has been shaped by family, faith, music, and the people he's met along the way. His writing reflects a deep love for the ordinary and the sacred found in everyday life.
- Years of Life Experience
- 50+
- Years of Life Experience
- & Songwriter
- Poet
- & Songwriter
- & Storyteller
- Pastor
- & Storyteller
Born: 1951, McKeesport, Pennsylvania
Education: B.A. in Creative Writing, Pennsylvania State University, 1974
Tim's poems return again and again to a single conviction: that grace shows up in ordinary places — a mother's kitchen, a motorcycle ride to a church meeting, a son's fist-sized hole in a bedroom wall. He writes without pretense, willing to be funny, irreverent, grieving, and devout within the same poem, often within the same stanza.
- 1951 –
A Pennsylvania Childhood
Tim grew up in White Oak, a small community in McKeesport, Pennsylvania — a mill-town landscape of row houses, corner drug stores, and porches where old men traded stories. That landscape, and the people who filled it, would return again and again in his later poems: the bread truck on the corner, the crack of a pool hall break, a boy on his bicycle heading home for supper.
- Early 1970s
Penn State and the Writing Life
Tim studied Creative Writing at Pennsylvania State University, graduating in 1974. It was during these years that he first picked up a guitar in earnest, and writing and music became lifelong companions — two instruments for saying the same true things in different keys.
- 1970s – present
Music and Ministry
Alongside his writing, Tim built a life as a songwriter and musician, and was later ordained as a Lutheran pastor. Decades in parish ministry put him in rooms with people at the most unguarded moments of their lives — funerals, hospital bedsides, kitchen-table confessions — and gave his poetry its unusual mix of tenderness, dark humor, and hard-won faith.
- Ongoing
Family
Tim's family runs through his work like a river — his parents' house in Pennsylvania, his wife, his son Spencer, and the friends and colleagues in ministry who became chosen family. Jungle of Faith is dedicated simply: "To my family!"
- 2026
Jungle of Faith
Jungle of Faith gathers decades of Tim's poems into a single collection — moving from small-town memory to spiritual reflection, from grief to unexpected humor. It is not a devotional in the conventional sense; it is a poet's honest accounting of what it has meant to walk, as one of his poems puts it, "a champion of love if not of fate."