Each page in Good News: My Coloring Book holds two things: a Bible verse and an illustration waiting to be colored in. That is the entire mechanism, and for Ashante PT Stokes, who spent more than a decade building a career across gospel recording and film before the book’s April 2026 release, it was also the point.
The book reached the top of its Amazon category shortly after publication, earning the No. 1 bestseller designation in Amazon’s Religion & Spirituality Manga listing. The 43-page paperback targets readers between four and ten years old and carries a $9.99 price point. Its Amazon listing describes the intended audience as families, Sunday school programs, homeschooling households, and family devotion groups, a range that suggests Stokes was building something with multiple entry points rather than a single use occasion.
Good News: My Coloring Book draws from a wide spread of Scripture: passages from Romans, Psalms, Isaiah, Luke, and others, each paired with original artwork. The listing describes the book’s themes as hope, salvation, joy, and faith, and says the illustrations move from scenes of praise and worship toward depictions of the Gospel message. The format of pairing Scripture with coloring pages has been part of children’s religious education for generations. What shifts between iterations is the verse selection and the quality of the artwork, and both reflect the sensibility of whoever made the book.
Faith was part of the frame long before Stokes built a professional career around it. In Atlanta, he sang as a youth chanter at Wheat Street Baptist Church and learned hand bells at Hillside Presbyterian. He spent a year of early childhood in Pittsburgh with his paternal grandparents before finishing high school in Middletown, Connecticut, where he was a scholar-athlete who competed as a sprinter at the Junior Olympics level through USATF Youth. He carried the athletics to Ohio University, where he ran in the Mid-American Conference as a Bobcat.
The professional turn toward music and ministry came in 2010, when he entered the Gospel Music Association’s Immerse competition and advanced to the semifinal round. A few years later, under the performance name PT The Gospel Spitter, he launched his recording career and founded his label and production company, Serving the Peace, LLC. A promo video he recorded for United Christian Broadcasters in April 2014, connected to a segment for BigChurchDayOut, landed on their streaming playlist before his label’s formal releases reached wide circulation.
His 2014 studio album Raise Up produced two singles, “Understanding God” and “Salvation RMX,” both developed as music mini-films with StewArt Media Studios. Salvation RMX proved the more visible of the two. It was an official selection of the Gwinnett Center International Film Festival in August 2015, where it took the Audience Choice award and brought Stokes a best director nomination. In late 2015 and into early 2016, the video held a position among the top three airing on streaming television’s Christian Hip Hop channel, according to broadcast tracking cited in his public biography. Television work followed in the same period, with a credited role on TV One’s Born Again Virgin and, per his published biography, a part in the Bounce TV church drama Saints & Sinners, in which he portrayed a barber named Dwight.
Acting had come without being planned. A friend suggested he try out for a small part in the indie film Burning Bridges in late 2013, and the casting director moved him into a larger supporting role. From there came an uncredited detective role in Taken 3 and a part in Ant-Man, both in 2014. He also contributed voice work to Quantum Break, the video game and episodic television project developed by Remedy Entertainment and Microsoft Studios, according to his published biography.
Good News: My Coloring Book is the same work in a different form. The music carried the message through performance and lyric. The acting placed Stokes inside other people’s stories. The coloring book puts Scripture in a child’s hands, one page at a time.
