Joe Lapp is a communications professional and writer from the United States. He has lived in cross-cultural settings for much of his life, including significant international experience.

As a marketing and communications leader, Joe has worked in the international development sector and in international schools in Asia and Africa, and at the University of California, Davis. He has experience with communications management, strategy, planning, branding, campaign implementation, mentoring and training, internal comms and external outreach, multichannel digital and offline content creation, media and public relations, executive advising, and metrics gathering and analysis.

As a writer, he has published features, essays, op-eds, poetry and more in publications such as the Washington Post, Washington City Paper, Lancaster Sunday News, Pakistan’s English-language daily Dawn, Washington History magazine, The Mennonite magazine, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, and the DC neighborhood history volume Washington At Home.

Joe grew up the son of an Amish-Mennonite preacher from Pennsylvania who established a church in a low-income, Black neighborhood in Washington DC. He studied at LeTourneau University in Texas, then graduated from Michigan-based Calvin College with a degree in English. After an AmeriCorps stint in San Francisco and a 5,000 mile bike ride across the US, he went back to his childhood neighborhood of Kenilworth in Northeast DC to research and write, creating a grant-supported booklet of neighborhood history.

Since the mid-2000s, Joe has lived largely overseas with his wife, who is an international humanitarian development professional, including time in Pakistan, Burundi, Ghana, Vietnam, and Timor-Leste.

Contact Joe via email at lappjoe at yahoo dot com, or message him through Facebook or Instagram.