Glendale, CA – August 22nd, 2026 – John Cheyenne Wilbur’s Grace Notes, a deeply personal novel about one man’s turbulent search for faith and belonging, has received the Literary Titan Book Award, recognizing the book’s powerful portrayal of spiritual struggle, emotional healing, and the lifelong journey toward becoming fully oneself.

Blending fiction with experiences drawn from Wilbur’s own life, Grace Notes follows Jerry Cradleman, a gifted and anxious young man who feels profoundly disconnected from himself and the people around him. His search for home becomes a search for God, carrying him from an emotionally distant childhood in New Jersey to ultimately a transformative pilgrimage to Jerusalem.

This is not a conventional story of faith. Jerry’s path unfolds through panic attacks, trauma, activism, depression, religious vocation, mysticism, music, and moments of unexpected grace. His spiritual development is neither orderly nor certain. Instead, Grace Notes portrays belief as something forged through doubt, longing, failure, discovery, and the courage to confront what has been hidden.

Literary Titan praised the novel as “an earnest, emotionally generous novel about faith as a lived struggle rather than an intellectual conclusion,” highlighting Wilbur’s portrayal of Jerry’s complex inner life and the book’s ability to explore difficult subjects through intimate, energetic storytelling.

Music serves as one of the novel’s central metaphors. The title refers to the small ornamental notes that can transform a musical passage while also raising a larger spiritual question: Is a grace note expendable, or is it essential to the whole composition?

For Wilbur, the answer reaches beyond music.

“We are, all of us, grace notes in God’s Symphony,” he explains.

That tension runs throughout the novel as Jerry wrestles with whether individual lives possess meaning and whether broken, wounded people still have an indispensable part to play. Piano performances, classical music, and improvised sessions become part of a larger meditation on identity, purpose, and grace.

Wilbur describes Grace Notes as autofiction, explaining that the project began as a memoir before fiction gave him greater freedom to shape the material into a compelling narrative. That autobiographical foundation gives the novel its confessional intensity and emotional immediacy.

At its heart, however, Wilbur hopes readers carry away a simple message: hope.

“Life can get better. Life can be good,” Wilbur says. He encourages readers to follow “the path with their name and only their name on it” toward knowing and accepting who they truly are.

For readers who are spiritual but skeptical, wounded but still seeking, Grace Notes offers a candid portrayal of faith without easy answers. It asks what happens when a person stops treating spirituality as a destination and begins understanding it as an ongoing journey toward truth, connection, and home.

Readers can purchase The Literary Titan award-winning Grace Notes through Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

About the Author

John Cheyenne Wilbur is an author and ordained Presbyterian minister whose writing explores faith, identity, trauma, healing, and the complex search for spiritual belonging. His own faith journey began during a profound personal crisis at age eighteen, when an unexpected spiritual experience gave rise to a fledgling belief that would ultimately lead him to Princeton Theological Seminary and ordained ministry.

While serving his first church, Wilbur entered therapy and began confronting previously unexamined family trauma, including the painful recognition of childhood abuse. His evolving understanding of faith eventually led him to leave formal ministry as his spirituality became increasingly personal and mystical.

More than three decades later, Wilbur continues to view faith not as a fixed destination but as a continuing journey.

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