Ashante PT Stokes arrived at book publishing after more than a decade in gospel music and film. The debut went better than expected. Good News: My Coloring Book, his 43-page faith-based coloring title for children between four and ten, reached the No. 1 spot in Amazon’s Religion and Spirituality Manga category, according to the product listing. Published in April 2026, it appeared in print roughly 13 years after Stokes first performed professionally in a completely different medium.
Born in Atlanta, Georgia, he spent a year of his early childhood in Pittsburgh with his paternal grandparents before his family moved on. He finished high school in Middletown, Connecticut, where he was a scholar-athlete and competed in USATF Youth track at the Junior Olympics level. At Ohio University, he ran sprints for the Bobcats in the Mid-Atlantic Conference. Athletics was one chapter. The longer one was faith.
As a child in Atlanta, Stokes was a youth chanter at Wheat Street Baptist Church and played hand bells at Hillside Presbyterian Church. Those years gave him a practical understanding of what worship looks like from the inside. By 2010, he was competing in the Gospel Music Association’s Immerse competition, reaching the semifinal round.
The music career started in 2013. After working with vocal coach Maria Clark and recording his first mixtape singles through Hit’em Hard Entertainment, Stokes performed for the first time as PT The Gospel Spitter at Mark SQuared in Tucker, Georgia, on January 25, 2013. He founded Serving the Peace, LLC that same year, establishing it as his label and production company. The company has remained his primary creative infrastructure since.
His 2014 studio album, Raise Up, generated two singles that became music mini-films. “Understanding God” came out in October 2014. “Salvation RMX” followed in 2015 through a deal Serving the Peace made with StewArt Media Studios. Salvation RMX screened at the Gwinnett Center International Film Festival in August 2015, winning the Audience Choice award and earning Stokes a best director nomination. By early 2016, it was in the top three on streaming television’s Christian Hip Hop channel.
Acting arrived through a personal recommendation. The mentor who had introduced Stokes to Hit’em Hard Entertainment suggested he try for a small role in the indie film Burning Bridges. He auditioned, was offered a larger part, and took it: Angelo, an attorney whose role drives the film’s central plot development. That led to further work. He had an uncredited detective role in Taken 3 and appeared as a prison officer in Ant-Man, both released in 2015.
Moving into publishing was not entirely without precedent for Stokes. Serving the Peace has functioned as a standalone creative enterprise for more than a decade, producing content across music, film, and now print. Adding authorship was another step within the same framework rather than a departure from it.
Then, in April 2026, Good News: My Coloring Book.
The book pairs Bible verses drawn from Romans, Psalms, Isaiah, and Luke with illustrations for children to color. The Amazon listing describes scenes of praise and worship alongside depictions of the Gospel message, designed to give young readers a hands-on way to engage with those passages. Stokes developed the book for quiet time, Sunday school, homeschooling, and family devotion settings. The themes the listing identifies are hope, salvation, joy, and faith. They are also the themes Stokes has returned to across his music and film work since founding Serving the Peace in 2013.
Good News: My Coloring Book runs to 43 pages and retails at $9.99 in paperback. According to the Amazon product listing, it carries the No. 1 bestseller designation in the Religion and Spirituality Manga category.