Archives: Authors
Jessica Fayerman
Jessica Fayerman is a lawyer and a mom who is relatively new to Soto Zen practice. She practices with a great group in Chicago and recently spent a week as a guest student at the San Francisco Zen Center. With her crazy schedule, she credits her fledgling Zen practice and study with helping her achieve a grounded sense of well-being.
Justin Luu
Justin Luu is a consultant in the IT industry with a background in software engineering and business. He has also helped serve the Buddhist community in various ways including being one of the founding members of the Mitra Youth Buddhist Network and co-convenor of the 2007 Mitra Buddhist Conference. He also gives talks and conducts workshops as part of the Dhamma sharing group at the Buddhist Library. In his own practice, Justin attends retreats abroad and locally. He's from Sydney, and currently lives in Kenya.
Samantha Updegrave
Samantha Updegrave is a single mama extraordinaire living in Seattle, Washington with her three-year-old son Oscar. She holds a Certificate in Creative Non-Fiction Writing from the University of Washington, and works as a land use consultant and freelance writer. Read more at her <a href="https://bysamanthaclaire.wordpress.com/">blog</a>.
Marcus Seiryu Wilkinson
Marcus Seiryu Wilkinson is a horticulturist, certified permaculture designer and gardening educator who lives and works in Oberlin, OH, where he is converting his one-acre yard into a micro-farm. He teaches in Lorain County Community College’s Sustainable Agriculture Program and is a Visiting Instructor in Oberlin College’s Environmental Studies Program. He has been a sangha member of the Village Zendo in New York City since 1999. Read more at his <a href="http://earthstorehouse.blogspot.ca/">blog</a>.
Sonya Huber
Sonya Huber is a creative writing teacher at Fairfield University, and has written two books of memoir: <i>Opa Nobody</i> and <i>Cover Me: A Health Insurance Memoir</i>, both published by University of Nebraska Press. She wrote this essay at age 34, as she "shyly began to admit that I was a Buddhist." Read more at sonyahuber.com.
Marloes Lasker
Marloes started her zen practice in 2001 as a student of Nico Tydeman Sensei, and became ordained as a monk in 2010. She is legally deafblind from Usher Syndrome. Marloes lives with her husband and her retired guide dog in Utrecht, the Netherlands.
Joshua Shin
Joshua Shin switched majors five times at three different schools before earning his associate's degree in Psychology at Bakersfield College in 2010. He is currently attending California State University, Bakersfield, where he is working on his BA in Sociology.
Carol Lorton Shilor
Carol is 31 and lives in Lafayette, Indiana, with her husband. She has degrees in psychology, criminology and philosophy, and calls herself "a curious mind. A skeptic, but a hopeless romantic. A realist, but a dreamer."
Ishita Gupta
Ishita Gupta is the founder and publisher of <a href="http://fearlessstories.com/">Fear.less Magazine</a>, an online magazine that profiles leading thinkers and their experiences overcoming fear. She lives in New York City.
Sarah Fox
Sarah Fox calls herself an overeducated waitress. She has a master’s degree in history and folklore, and lives in Seattle with her husband, their two-year-old son and their two giant dogs. She slings food for a living, cultivates a sprawling vegetable garden, and participates in the Seattle sangha, and is currently working on a book-length manuscript exploring ordinary people’s stories of nuclear contamination in the American West.
Susan Yao
Susan Yao (she/hers) has been a middle school educator for 12 years, most recently serving as the Middle School Head at Friends Academy in Dartmouth, MA. She has practiced Buddhism for 17 years in Korean Zen and Insight traditions. She is currently exploring a Buddhist educational program for K-8 students, the Laughing Rivers School. She lives on a homestead with her family in Vermont.
Ben J. Hutchison
"I am a husband. I am a father. I sit zazen daily," says Ben Hutchison. He lives in Cincinnati.
Duc Hong Ta
Duc Hong Ta is an inmate in a California State Prison, where he's serving 35 to life.
Angela Allan
Angela Allan graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Wesleyan University with a B.A. in English and a concentration in creative writing. She has walked a pilgrimage across Spain, researched dragonfly thermoregulation in Guyana, taught English in Ecuador, backpacked through Europe and Morocco, and trekked across icebergs off the Southern coast of Argentina. She writes stories, rhyming poems and creative non-fiction. Read more at her <a href="http://angelaallan.com/">website</a>.
Leslie Gossett
"A student of all things human, I find myself coming to the spaces between," Leslie Gossett says. "I write, breathe, think, feel, learn, fear, love, lose, eat, practice yoga, meditate, and sleep." She recently relocated to the Bay Area, and attends school for Holistic Health.