Archives: Authors

Michael Hebb

Michael Hebb is the author of Let’s Talk About Death (Over Dinner) and the founder of Deathoverdinner.org and EOL.community, a comprehensive platform for end of life planning and grief.

Marissa (she/hers) identifies as queer, Buddhist, Japanese, and Chinese American. She is currently attending UCLA in pursuit of a Master of Social Welfare. She is on the editorial board of the Young Buddhist Editorial (YBE) as well as a part of the social justice committee.

Chris Pacheco

Chris Pacheco is the Associate AV Editor at Lion's Roar, a Brazilian Jiu Jitsu practitioner, and writes On Being Human, a monthly newsletter to share ideas that could potentially change the way you live.

Kevin Singer

Kevin Singer (<a href="https://twitter.com/kevinsinger0">@kevinsinger0</a>) is Head of Media and Public Relations at Springtide Research Institute and has taught world religions at two community colleges for the last ten years.

Ben Connelly

Ben Connelly is a Soto Zen priest in the Katagiri lineage based at Minnesota Zen Meditation Center. He is the author of Inside Vasubandhu’s Yogacara.

Ven. Hui Dong

Sister Kinh Nghiem

Sister Kinh Nghiem has been a nun for over twenty years. Also known as Sister Reverence, she trained directly with Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh as his attendant in Plum Village, France, and assisted him on his teaching tours around the world. She is a senior Teacher at Deer Park Monastery, California.

Shaila Catherine

Shaila Catherine has been practicing meditation since 1980, with more than eight years of accumulated silent retreat experience. She has taught insight meditation since 1996 in the U.S. and internationally. Shaila has dedicated several years to studying with masters in India, Nepal and Thailand, completed a one-year intensive meditation retreat with the focus on concentration and jhana, and authored Focused and Fearless: A Meditator’s Guide to States of Deep Joy, Calm, and Clarity. Shaila Catherine has practiced under the guidance of Venerable Pa-Auk Sayadaw since 2006; she authored Wisdom Wide and Deep: A Practical Handbook for Mastering Jhana and Vipassana to help make this traditional approach to meditative training accessible to Western practitioners. She is the founder of Bodhi Courses, an online dhamma classroom, and Insight Meditation South Bay, a Buddhist meditation center in Silicon Valley.

Avikrita Vajra Rinpoche

Melvin Christopher Horton

Melvin Christopher Horton is an active member of three Buddhist sanghas in New York City. He’s a writer, a poet, and a long-suffering Mets fan.

Beth Wallace

Beth Wallace is the Associate Publisher, Finance & Operations at Lion's Roar.

Bo-Mi Choi

Bo-Mi Choi is a Senior Dharma Teacher in the Kwan Um School of Zen and serves in the capacity of Director of Development and Outreach for the Cambridge Zen Center. She also leads a weekly student meditation group at Harvard University where she teaches philosophy and critical theory in the College.

Minna Jain

Minna Jain (they/them) is a lay ordained practitioner of Sōtō Zen Buddhism and member of the BIPOC activist group, the Buddhist Justice Reporter. Minna works as a Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Access (DEIA) Consultant and Racial Equity Trainer in Minneapolis, MN.

Canyon Sam

Canyon Sam encountered the dharma when she lived in Tibet in 1986, when it first opened. She helped found the Tibetan Nuns Project in 1987. A senior student of Thich Nhat Hanh, she is a nationally acclaimed performance artist now studying painting and yoga. Her creative nonfiction book, Sky Train: Tibetan Women on the Edge of History (Univ. of Washington Press, 2009, foreword by the Dalai Lama) won the PEN American Center Open Book Award. You can find more about her at <a href="http://www.canyonsam.com" rel="noopener">www.canyonsam.com</a>

Cindy Rasicot

Cindy Rasicot first met Ven. Dhammananda, Thailand’s first fully ordained Theravada bhikkhuni, at a conference soon after moving to Bangkok in 2005. Cindy’s book, Finding Venerable Mother, chronicles their relationship, including her own temporary ordination in 2014. Now living in the Bay Area, she regularly interviews her teacher; those conversations, called Casually Yours, can be found at cindyrasicot.com

Joy Brennan

Joy Brennan is a Soto Zen priest with the Mount Vernon Zen Sangha in Mount Vernon, Ohio, as well as a professor of Buddhism and East Asian religions at Kenyon College. Her academic work focuses on Buddhist conceptions of identity construction, such as those found in early Yogacara teachings, and the ways in which human beings construct their own worlds of experience.

Lauren Leve

Lauren Leve is an associate professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is the author of The Buddhist Art of Living in Nepal: Ethical Practice and Religious Reform. Her research interests include modern Buddhism, the cultural dynamics of globalization, gender, and the internationalized lineage of S. N. Goenka.

Sarah Jacoby

Sarah H. Jacoby is an associate professor in the religious studies department at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, where she specializes in Tibetan Buddhism. Her research interests include Buddhist revelation, gender and sexuality, the history of emotions, and the history of eastern Tibet. She is the author of Love and Liberation: Autobiographical Writings of the Tibetan Buddhist Visionary Sera Khandro.

Cecilia Mitra

Cecilia Mitra is the author of Opens Like a Flower, Cut it With a Knife: A Buddhist Mother's Journey Through Grief and former president of the Federation of Australian Buddhist Councils.

Donald Brackett

Donald Brackett is a Vancouver-based popular culture journalist and curator who writes about music, art and films. In addition to numerous essays, articles and radio broadcasts, he is also the author of several artist biography titles, among them Back to Black: Amy Winehouse’s Only Masterpiece (2016); Tumult!: The Incredible Life and Music of Tina Turner (2020); and Yoko Ono: An Artful Life (2022). His most recent book, Double Solitaire: The Films of Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder, is being published by Rowman Littlefield in September 2023.