Van McKellar

Author Biography: Van McKellar

Van B. McKellar is the author of Crumbs from the Master’s Table: I Overcame the Pain of Poverty, Prejudice, and Addiction on Grains of Faith, a transformational memoir rooted in his firsthand experience of growing up poor and Black in Jim Crow-era Texas. Born in 1939 and raised around Fort Worth, he came of age in a world shaped by poverty, racial segregation, limited opportunity, and the daily humiliations of systemic prejudice. From those beginnings, McKellar carried a childhood dream of flight that became both a literal aspiration and a powerful symbol of freedom, dignity, and self-discovery.

McKellar is especially qualified to write this memoir because the book’s central themes are not distant subjects to him; they are the substance of his own life. He writes as a witness to twentieth-century racial injustice, as a man who labored in cotton fields as a young boy, served honorably in the United States Air Force, pursued aviation, and eventually earned a Commercial Pilot’s License. His lifelong fascination with airplanes and his determination to fly give the memoir one of its defining emotional arcs: the movement from confinement toward possibility.

His authority also comes from decades of recovery and spiritual growth. McKellar has lived alcohol-free since August 11, 1965, and has not smoked since November 22, 1988. His sustained participation in a 12 Step recovery program gives him a personal and practical understanding of addiction, surrender, discipline, fellowship, and hope. As a former local minister in the Church of God in Christ, Inc., he brings a spiritual vocabulary to the story without reducing it to easy answers. Instead, Crumbs from the Master’s Table presents faith as something discovered, tested, and strengthened through adversity.

McKellar’s academic background further strengthens the historical and cultural dimensions of his work. He earned a Bachelor of Arts in African American Studies, with a minor in History, from Metropolitan State University of Denver in 2012. That education deepened his ability to connect personal memory with the broader Black experience in twentieth-century America. He is also a father of four adult daughters and an accomplished writer of rhyming poetry, qualities that inform the memoir’s reflective tone, moral seriousness, and attention to family legacy.

Together, these experiences make Van McKellar not merely the subject of Crumbs from the Master’s Table, but the only person who could tell it with its full measure of pain, endurance, humor, faith, and hard-earned wisdom. His qualifications are lived, spiritual, intellectual, and artistic. He writes from inside the history he describes, offering readers an honest account of survival, recovery, and the transforming power of even the smallest grains of faith.