Archives: Authors
Rev. Jon Turner
Rev. Jon Turner is the lead minister at EverydayBuddhist.org, which shares authentic and contemporary Shin Buddhist teachings and practices for everyday life, and a Resident Minister at Orange County Buddhist Church in Anaheim, California. Formerly a high school athlete, math major at UCLA, and computer programmer, Rev. Turner discovered Buddhism mid-life which changed the course of his life. He earned a master’s degree in Buddhist Studies from the Institute of Buddhist Studies in 2010 and was ordained as a Shin Buddhist Minister at the Nishi Hongwanji in Kyoto, Japan, in 2012. His free time is spent doing yoga with his wife, Linda, and enjoying their children, grandchildren, and dogs.
Roy Vongtama
Roy Vongtama has been both a professional actor and physician for over twenty years. Acting wise, he’s had more than a hundred film, TV, and stage roles, working with stars such as Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman. He’s directed several projects as well as written a bestselling book called <em>Healing Before You’re Cured</em>, and he produced the award-winning film <em>After the Rain</em>.
Jonathan Relucio
A senior trainer for Niroga Institute, Jonathan Relucio teaches yoga and meditation in schools, health clinics, juvenile detention facilities, homeless shelters, and community-based organizations. With over twenty years of professional experience in social service delivery, nonviolence training, leadership development, and community organizing, Relucio values yoga as a healing practice of liberation that dismantles tools and systems of oppression while strengthening communities and social justice movements.
Karuna Training
Karuna is a community of Contemplative Psychology practitioners who aspire to remain open-hearted in the face of pain and paradox. We train in methodologies combining ancient Tibetan Buddhism with Western psychological processes. We provide learning communities that aspire to integrate the trauma of the world by turning our allegiance to basic sanity.
Scott Tusa
Scott Tusa is a Buddhist meditation teacher and practitioner with over two decades of experience in the exploration and embodiment of the Buddhist path. Ordained by His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama at twenty-eight, Scott spent nine years as a Buddhist monk. Since 2008, he has been sharing his knowledge and guidance, teaching Buddhism and meditation worldwide, in person and online.
Ajaan Lee Dhammadharo
Ajaan Lee Dhammadharo (1907–1961) was one of the foremost teachers in the Thai Forest Tradition founded by Ajaan Sao Kantasilo and Ajaan Mun Bhuridatto. Known for his skill as a teacher and his mastery of supranatural powers, he was the first to bring the teachings of the Forest tradition out of the wilderness of northeastern Thailand and into the mainstream of the central part of the country.
Tarthang Tulku Rinpoche
Tarthang Tulku Rinpoche is a teacher in the Nyingma lineage of Tibetan Buddhism and the founder of over twenty organizations preserving and promoting Buddhist wisdom in Asia and the West. He has authored over two dozen books including <em>Gesture of Balance</em>, <em>Time, Space, and Knowledge</em>, <em>Kum Nye Tibetan Yoga</em>, and more.
Taryn Stickrath-Hutt
Taryn Stickrath-Hutt is a writer, painter, filmmaker, queer woman, and joyfully exhausted mother. Her top priorities are smashing the patriarchy, eating great pizza, and writing about topics ranging from spiritual epiphanies to haunted houses to hardboiled detectives (sometimes all at once). An Angeleno at heart and former Disney Imagineer, she now lives in Chicago with a focus on independent projects in fiction, film, and personal essay. She is a member of Midwest Buddhist Temple where she heads Niji Dharma, a program developing LGBTQ+ community initiatives rooted in Buddhist principles. She offers her deepest gratitude for the opportunity to publish her work with Lion’s Roar.
Rafal K. Stepien
Rafal K. Stepien is Research Associate and European Research Council Principal Investigator within the Institute for the Cultural and Intellectual History of Asia at the Austrian Academy of Sciences. He also serves as Associate Editor of the Journal of Buddhist Philosophy, and his publications include Buddhist Literature as Philosophy, Buddhist Philosophy as Literature. He has held the inaugural Berggruen Research Fellowship in Indian Philosophy at Oxford, the inaugural Cihui Foundation Faculty Fellowship in Chinese Buddhism at Columbia, an Exchange Scholarship in the Study of Religion at Harvard, and a Humboldt Research Fellowship in Buddhist Studies at Heidelberg University.
Helen Tworkov
Helen Tworkov is the founding editor of Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, the first and only independent Buddhist magazine; the author of Zen in America: Profiles of Five Teachers; and the co-author, with Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, of In Love with the World: A Monk’s Journey through the Bardos of Living and Dying. She first encountered Buddhism in Japan and Nepal during the 1960s, and has studied in both the Zen and Tibetan traditions. She began studying with Mingyur Rinpoche in 2006 and currently divides most of her time between New York and Nova Scotia.
Sera Khandro
Sera Khandro (1892–1940) was one of the most prolific Tibetan female authors of the past several centuries. At the age of fifteen, she left her home in Lhasa for eastern Tibet, embarking on a lifetime devoted to her spiritual path. She became a spiritual master, a revealer of ancient hidden teachings, a mystic, a visionary, a writer, a mother, and a vagabond. Her written works and spiritual lineage have been preserved and are now cherished worldwide.
Christina Lee Monson
Christina Monson (1969–2023) was a Buddhist teacher and Tibetan language translator who studied Buddhism for over thirty years, beginning at Brown University and the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Monson journeyed to Nepal in 1989 where she met her root guru, Chatral Sangye Dorje Rinpoche, under whose guidance she studied and practiced for the next twenty-seven years. Chatral Rinpoche first introduced her to Sera Khandro’s teachings, and Monson spent the last several years of her life translating Sera Khandro’s instructions into English.
John Dunne
John D. Dunne serves on the faculty of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he holds the Distinguished Chair in Contemplative Humanities at the Center for Healthy Minds. He is also chair of the Department of Asian Languages & Cultures. His work focuses on Buddhist philosophy and contemplative practice, especially in dialog with Cognitive Science and Psychology. His more than fifty publications appear in venues ranging across both the Humanities and the Sciences, including Foundations of Dharmakīrti’s Philosophy (2004) and Science and Philosophy in the Indian Buddhist Classics: The Mind (2020). John Dunne speaks in both academic and public contexts, and he occasionally teaches for Buddhist communities. His broader engagements include being a Fellow of the Mind and Life Institute, where he was previously a member of the board of directors, and serving as an academic advisor to the Rangjung Yeshe Institute in Kathmandu, Nepal.
Sara McClintock
Sara L. McClintock (they/them) is a Buddhist philosopher and scholar of religion whose interests converge at the intersections of ethics, metaphysics, truth, and story. They obtained their PhD from Harvard in 2002, and are now an associate professor at Emory University, where they teach graduate and undergraduate courses in Indian and Buddhist philosophy, Buddhist narrative traditions, women in Buddhism, and interpretation theory in the study of religion. A specialist in the work of Santaraksita and Kamalasila, they also write and translate more broadly on topics in narrative, epistemology, and ethics. Their current book project is a philosophical exploration of the transactional and camouflagic nature of truth, drawing on ideas from Indian Buddhist thinkers and putting them in conversation with contemporary concerns. While not busy with teaching and research, their passion is to discover ever new ways to nourish freedom and joy in daily life.
Johan Elverskog
Johan Elverskog is Dedman Family Distinguished Professor, professor of religious studies, and, by courtesy, professor of history at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. He is the author or editor of eleven books including the multiple award-winning Buddhism and Islam on the Silk Road.
Melanie Anne Gin
Melanie Anne Gin (she/they), True Light of Aspiration, is a Zen Buddhist poet and social changemaker residing on Chochenyo Ohlone land (Oakland, California). She currently works with local governments to support well-being and equity in communities of color, and is building the beloved community with Plum Village sanghas.
Aruni Wijesinghe
Aruni Wijesinghe is a project manager, ESL teacher, occasional sous chef and erstwhile belly dance instructor. A Pushcart Prize-nominated poet, her debut poetry collection, <em>2 Revere Place</em>, is available through Moon Tide Press and elsewhere. She lives a quiet life with her husband Jeff and their cats Jack and Josie.
Shin Yu Pai
Shin Yu Pai is Seattle's Civic Poet. She is the author of thirteen books, including <em>Less Desolate</em> (Blue Cactus) and <em>No Neutral</em> (Empty Bowl). She has received awards from the Academy of American Poets, Artist Trust, and 4Culture. Shin Yu Pai studied at Naropa University and earned her MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.