Kurtis Todd

Kurtis Todd grew up in Florida in the 1990s — which means he spent most of his childhood outside, unsupervised, and probably bleeding from something. He was a genuine kid who got along with nearly everyone and still somehow felt like the odd man out. Both things were true simultaneously, and he has spent a good portion of his adult life figuring out why that is.

He played football from age six through middle school, took a long break, then walked onto the field his senior year and asked the coach if he could try out. The coach informed him that tryouts were, in fact, over. An old friend vouched for him anyway. He made the team. He even started a few games at linebacker — though one of the regular linebackers was injured, a detail that feels relevant to the historical record.

At twelve he picked up the guitar and started drawing — inspired by a father whose artistic ability he deeply admired. By fourteen he was playing in small independent rock bands, and for a long stretch music was the dream. He toured a little. There is something that happens when a room full of people all move and sing together that is difficult to explain and impossible to forget. He has been thinking about what that something is ever since.

He enrolled at the University of South Florida for mechanical engineering and left within the first year to become a tattoo artist. At nineteen, with plenty of slow hours at the shop, he started reading — physics, biology, quantum mechanics, philosophy. Not for class. Just because the questions were interesting.

He lost his faith to AP Physics and engineering — completely, and went the other direction just as hard as he had gone the first. It took meeting his wife and watching his son arrive at the worst possible moment before he started asking honest questions again. Not looking for God. Just looking for truth, wherever it led.

He met his wife, built a life, and now has three children who are the actual point of everything. The book is what happened when the reading never stopped — and eventually had somewhere to go.