Archives: Authors

Sara Davidson

Sara Davidson is The New York Times best-selling author of Loose Change, Leap!, and Joan: Forty Years of Love, Loss, and Friendship with Joan Didion.

For over a decade, meditation teacher and author Kimberly Brown has offered classes and retreats that emphasize the power of compassion and kindness techniques to reconnect us to ourselves and others. She is the author of Navigating Grief and Loss: 25 Buddhist Practices to Keep your Heart Open to Yourself and Others (November 2022; Prometheus Books) and Steady, Calm, and Brave: 25 Practices for Resilience and Wisdom in a Crisis (revised version to be released in January 2023; Prometheus Books). Kimberly’s teachings provide an approachable pathway to personal and collective well-being through effective and modern meditations based on traditional practices. She is a long-time Buddhist student, trained in both the Tibetan and Insight schools of Buddhism, who retreats regularly at Insight Meditation Society and a Certified Mindfulness Instructor. Kimberly teaches at many meditation centers, including The Rubin Museum, Mindful Astoria, New York Insight Meditation Center, and The Interdependence Project, and is a regular contributor to Tricycle, Lion’s Roar, and other publications. You can learn more about her and her work at <a href="http://www.meditationwithheart.com" rel="noopener">meditationwithheart.com</a>.

Spencer Sherman

Spencer Sherman, is on a mission to use the timeless wisdom of the dharma to transform and empower our relationship with money. After getting his MBA from Wharton, he founded Abacus, a financial firm with Buddhist-inspired values. He is the author of The Cure for Money Madness and the Spirit of Money Workshop. His thirty-year Vipassana and Dzogchen meditation practice informs his work with money.

Joie Szu-Chiao Chen

Joie Szu-Chiao Chen is a PhD candidate in Buddhist Studies (Study of Religion) at Harvard University, where her research interests include pre-modern Tibetan religious life writing, institutional history, travel literature, and Buddhist art. She is the Chinese communications coordinator for 84000: Translating the Words of the Buddha.

Natalie Fisk Quli

Natalie Fisk Quli is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Buddhist Studies in Berkeley, where she offers courses in Theravada studies. Co-editor of Buddhism Beyond Borders, Methods in Buddhist Studies, and Pure Land Buddhism in China, her research focuses on Theravada Buddhism in the United States, primarily among Sri Lankan and Thai American Buddhists. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Shinshu Roberts

Shinshu Roberts is cofounder of Ocean Gate Zen Center in Santa Cruz, California, and holds the appointment of Kokusaifukyoshi (international teacher) with the Soto Zen School in Japan. A student of Sojun Mel Weitsman, she trained at San Francisco Zen Center for seventeen years. She is the author of Being-Time: A Practitioner’s Guide to Dogen Zenji’s Shobogenzo Uji; her writings also appear in Record of the Hidden Lamp and Receiving the Marrow.

Kritee

Kritee (dharma name Kanko) is a Rinzai Zen priest, climate scientist, and a cofounder of Boundless in Motion, a community in Boulder dedicated to “Zen meditation and strategic activism.” A microbiologist and biogeochemist by training, she is a senior scientist in the Environmental Defense Fund’s Climate Program, through which she helps implement climate-smart farming in India.

Eben Yonnetti

Eben Yonnetti is a PhD student in Religious Studies at the University of Virginia. His research interests include the contemporary transmission of Tibetan Buddhism across East Asia as well as the historical and contemporary relationships between Buddhists and the environment.

Vicki Mackenzie

Vicki Mackenzie is the author of The Revolutionary Life of Freda Bedi: British Feminist, Indian Nationalist, Buddhist Nun.

Kate Inglis

<a href="http://www.kateinglis.com/">Kate Inglis</a> is the award-winning author of <a href="http://www.kateinglis.com/notes-for-the-everlost/">Notes for the Everlost: A Field Guide to Grief</a> (Shambhala, September 2018) as well as several children's <a href="http://www.kateinglis.com/books">novels and picture books</a>. She lives on the Atlantic coast in Nova Scotia, Canada.

Tara U.

Tara U. is a member of the Berkeley Buddhist Temple and the Jodo Shinshu Buddhist community, where she helps with youth programming and community outreach activities. She just started her career in social work.

Richard Salomon

Richard Salomon is the director of the University of Washington Early Buddhist Manuscripts Project and general editor of the Gandharan Buddhist Texts series published by University of Washington Press. Since 1981 he has taught Sanskrit and Buddhist Studies in the Department of Asian Languages and Literature at University of Washington, where he is now professor emeritus. His latest book is The Buddhist Literature of Ancient Gandhara.

Jue Liang

Jue Liang is a doctoral candidate in the department of religious studies at University of Virginia, where she is completing her dissertation, “Conceiving the Mother of Tibet: The Life, Lives, and After- life of the Buddhist Saint Yeshe Tsogyel.” In her research, she reflects on gender dis- courses of Tibetan Buddhist communities, past and present. She is also interested in the theory and practice of translating Tibetan poetry, especially songs of realization and devotion.

Vinny Ferraro

Vinny Ferraro is on the senior faculty of Mindful Schools and has been leading a weekly group in San Francisco for the last fourteen years.

Bri Barnett

Bri Barnett is a twenty-nine-year-old nonbinary trans woman and a mindfulness facilitator who trained through East Bay Meditation Center’s “Practice in Transformative Action” program. They are also the director of development and communications at Trans Lifeline, the largest direct service provider to trans people in North America.

Johnny Edward Dean Jr.

Johnny Edward Dean Jr. is a writer and podcast host of "This is Buddhism my Homie", and a practitioner of Nichiren Shu Buddhism who currently resides in Tucson, AZ.

Aaron Stryker

Aaron Stryker is a twenty-three-year-old recent graduate of Wesleyan University, where he studied philosophy. He is a resident at the Ann Arbor Zen Temple and a founder of Dharma Gates, a nonprofit organization dedicated to making intensive meditation practice accessible to young people.

Ravi Mishra

Ravi Baikei Mishra is a Zen student with Zen Mountain Monastery and the author of the upcoming book, Vow of Aliveness. You can read more of his writing on <a href="https://ravimishra.substack.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://ravimishra.substack.com/&source=gmail&ust=1731005556466000&usg=AOvVaw327-IPLVVdC7hI0NQOjqQm">his blog on Substack</a>.

Stephen Batchelor

Stephen Batchelor began his Buddhist studies in 1972 in India, received full ordination as a bhikkhu in 1979, and disrobed in 1985, following three years of training in Korean Seon. The author of Buddhism Without Beliefs, he has become the face of the movement to find a secular, modern approach to the dharma; Bodhi College, which he cofounded in 2015, continues that project. He is married to dharma teacher and author Martine Batchelor, whom he met in Korea, where she trained as a Seon nun for ten years.

Pilar Jennings

Pilar Jennings is a psychoanalyst and a teacher of Tibetan Buddhism in the Sakya lineage. She is a visiting lecturer at Union Theological Seminary and Columbia University, as well as a faculty member of the Nalanda Institute for Contemplative Science. She teaches widely on integrating Buddhist modalities with a psychoanalytic approach, examining the impact of racism on children, of narcissism on environmental issues, and more. Her book To Heal a Wounded Heart is a psychoanalytic memoir about her entry into work as a Buddhist clinician.