Dr. Steven Clark Cunningham was born in Denver, Colorado. After graduating from Creighton University with majors in chemistry and Spanish, he attended medical school at George Washington University in Washington, DC. Having completed his residency in general surgery at the University of Maryland and a fellowship in surgery of the liver and pancreas at Johns Hopkins University, he now serves as Director of Pancreatic and Hepatobiliary Surgery as well as Director of Research at Saint Agnes Hospital in Baltimore, MD. He is currently completing his master's degree in religion at Harvard University. He has served as a contributing editor of Maryland Poetry Review, and his poems have appeared in that journal. In addition, his work won the literary arts contest sponsored by the magazine "The New Physician." His poems have also appeared in Chimeras, Word House Baltimore's Literary Calendar, and in the anthologies Function at the Junction #2, Pasta Poetics, and Poems for Chromosomes. "Dinosaur Name Poems" / "Poems de Nobres de Dinosaurios" (Three Conditions Press, 2009), his first full-length book of children's poetry, translated into Spanish by his wife, Myriam Gorospe, won the 2009 Moonbeam Award in both the Children's Poetry and the Spanish Language categories. His second book, "Your Body Sick and Well: How Do You Know?" (Three Conditions Press, 2020), was awarded 1st Place in Children's Nonfiction at the 26th Annual CIPA EVVY Awards Contest, sponsored by the Colorado Independent Publishers Association, and a Gold Medal in the 14th Annual Moonbeam Awards. It was also a Finalist in the 14th Annual National Indie Excellence Awards.

It's Considerate to Be Literate about Religion is a book of poems and prose for young readers, their parents, and their teachers. Along with Cunningham's award-winning books Dinosaur Name Poems and Your Body Sick and Well: How Do You Know? this new book shares the motif of using the names of things (nomenclature) to introduce topics that otherwise may be unfamiliar, such as the difference between the religious and the secular, or between a devotional approach to practicing a religion and an academic approach to studying religion, or among all the various ways one can be religiously literate and religiously illiterate.
The lyrical nature of the poems and the very engaging pencil illustrations by Susan Detwiler give each topic the traction needed to get youth (and adults) reading right into the poems and on through the expansive "Learn More!" sections that follow each poem.
In addition, a lively preface explains the joy of creating words, such as "poemenclature"; a helpful introduction welcomes readers to the concept of religious literacy; a fulsome glossary defines terms used in the book; and a section of suggested further reading offers a wide variety of sources for those who want to learn more.