The Star Seeker

Michael Colvin is a writer, educator, and storyteller whose career has taken him across classrooms, congregations, newsrooms, and university halls. A resident of Forest Grove, Oregon, he brings to his fiction the same curiosity about human nature that has animated decades of work in some of the most people-centered professions there are. Colvin spent years as a teacher, developing the patient attention to how people learn and grow that would later inform his approach to character. His work as a pastor deepened that attention into something more searching - a sustained engagement with questions of meaning, suffering, spiritual formation, and the complicated grace that moves through ordinary lives. Those questions have never left him, and they are woven throughout The Star Seeker and the novels that follow it. His career extended into university administration, where he worked at the intersection of institutional life and human development, navigating the competing demands of community, mission, and individual flourishing. He brought the same instinct for story to journalism and public broadcasting, where he learned to find the essential human thread in complex events and render it clearly for audiences who had no reason to care until he gave them one. The Star Seeker is his debut novel and the first book in The Third Path trilogy. Set in first-century CE North Africa, it follows twin protagonists Amara and Juba - children of an Amazigh resistance leader - as they come of age under Roman occupation, guided by a Persian scholar who has been carrying a secret across continents for forty years. The novel draws on Colvin's lifelong interest in Amazigh history and culture, his theological formation, and his belief that the most important stories are the ones that ask what it costs to remain human under pressure. He lives with his wife Susan in Forest Grove, Oregon, where he is at work on the second novel in the trilogy.