Carlos Whittaker

Carlos Whittaker grew up in Pico Rivera, in east Los Angeles, inside a church his father had founded. Fermín Augustine Whittaker, a Black Panamanian from Colón, reached the United States in 1960 with twenty dollars and a shoeshine kit and started the First Bilingual Baptist Church there; Carlos's mother came from Monterrey, Mexico. For years he led worship and recorded, his album Ragamuffin Soul arriving through Integrity Music and sharing a name with his blog, and in 2007 he moved to Atlanta to direct service programming at Buckhead Church, a North Point Community Church campus. How to Human: Three Ways to Share Life Beyond What Distracts, Divides, and Disconnects Us appeared from WaterBrook in January 2023 with Sharon McMahon writing the foreword, arranged around three verbs, be, see and free. He writes in it about a DNA test that turned up Nigerian ancestry and about testing his own racial assumptions. Publishers Weekly liked the storytelling and called the book overstuffed. He lives in Nashville.