Author and Speaker Janice Elsheimer delivers the message that creativity is a pathway to personal and spiritual growth. Writers, visual artists, musicians, actors, creative folks of all types who want to start exercising their artistic muscles fill her workshops, seminars and retreats. They leave with a new sense of what is possible: the confidence that they can enrich their lives by developing their God-given talents.

She is the author of three books to date, including the ECPA Silver Medallion award-winning The Creative Call, Word Weavers (written with co-author Eva Marie Everson, and the newly released Garden Graces: The Wisdom in Growing Things . She is working on her first novel, based on her years as a "back-to-the-lander" in the Ozark Mountains during the 1970s and '80s.

Janice attended Florida State University on music scholarships, eventually earning a BA in English education from the University of Central Florida. She holds a Masters in Gifted Education from the University of Arkansas and has taught students at every level from kindergarten through college. Her interest in creativity, whether in the classroom, the studio, the garden, or the kitchen derives from her own love of putting her hand to something. Convinced that people are creative by nature, she believes that despite our culture’s attempt to dissuade us from “wasting our time” on creative activities, our artistic pursuits can be the best use of our time. Even in the classroom, where she still teaches gifted 4th and 5th graders, encouraging creativity in her students is one of her most important goals.

During her thirteen years spent in Arkansas she literally built her own house—while cultivating a half-acre organic garden and orchard on twenty-five acres of mountaintop land, teaching English full time, getting her masters degree, and raising her son James. Janice believes that when the work we do results in creating something new, it brings us closer to God and to becoming the people we were created to be. This ideal has informed her goals and philosophy in the years since her return to Winter Park, Florida, where she lives, writes, plays music, gardens and shares a good life with her highly creative husband Seth.

Janice is a member of AWSA (Advanced Writers & Speakers Association), a national organization of outstanding women writers, Word Weavers Christian Writers Group in Orlando. She is graduate of CLASS (Christian Leaders, Authors, Speakers Services) and is a frequent speaker at conferences, both Christian and secular, throughout the country. Her writing has appeared in Garden Design, In Touch, The 101, Orlando Arts, and Alive Online magazines. She has appeared as a guest columnist in The Orlando Sentinel newspaper.