Archives: Authors
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.
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.
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, <i>Sky Train: Tibetan Women on the Edge of History</i> (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, <em>Finding Venerable Mother</em>, 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 <em>The Buddhist Art of Living in Nepal: Ethical Practice and Religious Reform</em>. 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 <em>Love and Liberation: Autobiographical Writings of the Tibetan Buddhist Visionary Sera Khandro</em>.
Cecilia Mitra
Cecilia Mitra is the author of <em>Opens Like a Flower, Cut it With a Knife: A Buddhist Mother's Journey Through Grief</em> 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 <em>Back to Black: Amy Winehouse’s Only Masterpiece</em> (2016); <em>Tumult!: The Incredible Life and Music of Tina Turner</em> (2020); and <em>Yoko Ono: An Artful Life</em> (2022). His most recent book, <em>Double Solitaire: The Films of Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder</em>, is being published by Rowman Littlefield in September 2023.
Emily McRae
Emily McRae is the Editorial Assistant intern for LionsRoar.com. She recently graduated from the University of King’s College with a journalism degree, and plans to work in the publishing industry.
Mihiri Tillakaratne
Mihiri Tillakaratne (she/her) is a former associate editor at Lion's Roar. She has a PhD in Ethnic Studies and Gender, Women, and Sexuality (UC Berkeley), a M.A. in Ethnic Studies (UC Berkeley), and a M.A. in Asian American Studies (UCLA). She learned Pali and studied Sinhala Buddhist nationalism in post-independence Sri Lanka at Harvard. Mihiri is the director of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EEw5BQq_ENM">I Take Refuge</a>, a documentary on Sri Lankan American Buddhist identity, and the founder of <a href="https://www.srilankanamericansforsocialjustice.com/">Sri Lankan Americans for Social Justice</a>.
Mary Ray Cate
Mary Ray Cate is a physician, artist, and graduate of the Buddhist chaplaincy program at Upaya Zen Center. In addition to having a grown son, she has been a foster mom to many children.
Butterfly Tony Pham
Butterfly (Tony Pham) (they/he) is a meditation instructor, compassion teacher, and healer that occupies the intersection of queer and Asian/BIPOC identities. Butterfly stewards spiritual spaces where they offer practices rooted in compassion, indigeneity, and sacred lineages. They are a current student of Arinna Weisman (Theravada/Vipassana) and Lama Rod Owens (Vajrayana/Tibetan Buddhism) in addition to participating in the East Bay Meditation Center’s PiTA8 program for social justice activists. Tony previously received a Fulbright scholarship to conduct research in Vietnam; he has also completed compassion cultivation, death doula and non-violent communication training. Butterfly is honored to currently serve as treasurer on the board of directors of the Buddhist Peace Fellowship. They now reside in Brooklyn (occupied Canarsie/Munsee Lenape land). For more information, please visit <a href="https://tonyopham.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer">tonyopham.com</a>