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Born in Boston and educated in engineering, business, and natural health, Bruce Campelia—engineer, entrepreneur, health advocate, and storyteller—is, above all, a seeker. And his latest search is for something increasingly endangered in the scroll-fed churn of digital life: the enduring relevance of the book.
“There’s something about the long form,” he says. “When you’re really inside a book, you’re with the storyteller. You’re with the characters. That engagement—the way it maps in the brain—is different. It stays.”
This belief—rooted not only in his philosophical instincts but also in neuroscience—has animated his foray into fiction with The Light Passer trilogy, a young adult fantasy epic featuring four culturally diverse teens who embark on a mythic journey of self-discovery and connection. In Quest of the Chosen, the first book of the series, Campelia brings together a Lakota Sioux girl, a Black teen from Detroit, a Hong Kong-born tech whiz, and a Palestinian girl—characters drawn from his global wanderings and convictions about unity.
“I wanted them to be flawed,” Campelia says, “to be real. Because what I realized at fifteen was—I didn’t know who the hell I was. And I don’t think most kids do.” The books, he explains, are ultimately about finding your light and learning how to pass it on. “It’s go within, then go beyond.”
Campelia’s résumé reads like a kaleidoscope—physics lectures, corporate boardrooms, Middle Eastern cafés, school gymnasiums filled with children learning about health. In between, he wrote. On planes. In hotel rooms. Between meetings. But the dream of authorship had to wait until the kids—his own daughters—were grown, and the noise of a hyperproductive life subsided.
“I didn’t save anything I wrote back then,” he admits. “I just kept going.”
What finally emerged was not just a fantasy series, but a multi-platform message. A kind of slow-burn, digital-era campaign for the soul of reading. Campelia’s website, LightPassers.com and his companion Substack presence, sells not just books but also “wear and share” messages—manifestos disguised as merchandise. On Substack, he distills his novels’ themes into short reflections. “If this is how they find the story,” he says, “then so be it.”
Campelia is realistic about the tectonic shift in media consumption. “We’ve become a society of scrollers,” he acknowledges. “Kids don’t have the attention spans. Hell, venture capitalists didn’t either. I’d pitch these complex systems and they’d say, ‘Put it on a bumper sticker.’”
But he doesn’t despair. Instead, he adapts. Short videos. Essays. Bite-sized entry points that—like mythic gateways—invite readers into deeper, more lasting experiences. He admits the marketing side is exhausting. “No author used to wear all these hats,” he says, exasperated but not bitter. “Now you’re the writer, the publisher, the agent, the sales team. It’s not sustainable.”
Still, he’s not ready to surrender. His deepest worry, he confides, isn’t about books losing their meaning. It’s about losing the authors. “If we don’t support them—if they can’t survive—it’ll be all corporate speak. That’s what scares me most.”
Yet Campelia is not pausing for fear. He’s pivoting. “The product isn’t just the books anymore,” he says. “It’s the story. The message. This idea that we’ve got to reintroduce people to themselves and to each other.”
If that sounds lofty, perhaps it is. But Campelia wears it lightly. For him, the question “Are books still important?” is answered not in statistics or market share, but in the mirror of memory and meaning. In the way a story makes a child feel seen. In the quiet fire that passes from reader to reader, like light from a lantern.
“We’re all buried under these layers,” he says. “Friends, teachers, parents, media—all these expectations. You forget who you are. That’s why we need stories. To unravel. To remember.”
And in that act of remembering—one line, one page, one journey at a time—Bruce Campelia remains what he always wanted to be: a light passer.