Dr. Marlega Graves graduated with her PhD in American Culture Studies with a competency in American social history from Bowling Green State University. Her dissertation is titled: The New Culture War: Critical Race Theory, Gender Politics, K-12 School Board Meetings, Founding Myths, and the Religious Right.

She received the Presidential Graduate Diversity Award Scholarship at BGSU and graduated with a 4.0. "I am a first-generation college student and the first in my lineage to have graduated from a four-year college and to go all the way through to a PhD program."

Dr. Graves received a Master of Divinity from Northeastern Seminary in 2007. Dr. Graves is part of a team of authors working with The Bible For Normal People to contribute to a children's Bible. God's Stories as Told by God's Children.

Marlena has been on the pastoral staff at several churches, worked at non-profits, been on the residence life staff at a university, and worked for the Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC) – for and with migrant farmworkers in the Midwest and South and the minority community in Toledo, OH. She continues to labor alongside others for justice, for human rights. Since 2015, she has been an adjunct professor at Winebrenner Seminary in the areas of discipleship and spiritual formation. She has written for a wide variety of venues like Christianity Today’s Hermeneutics Blog (now CT Women), Womenleaders.com, and Our Daily Bread where she was a bylined regularly contributing writer. And also for places like, Think Christian, Faith Street, Relevant, and publications by (in) courage and the Zondervan Women’s Study Bible. Marlena is a former member and board member of the Redbud Writers Guild.