The Best Buddhist Writing 2010 - Melvin McLeod [128]
Contributors
DIANE ACKERMAN is a poet, essayist, and naturalist, and the best-selling author of A Natural History of the Senses, The Zookeeper’s Wife, and Dawn Light, excerpted here. Ackerman lives in Ithaca, New York, and Palm Beach, Florida, with her partner of forty years, the novelist Paul West. She has the unusual distinction of having a molecule named after her—dianeackerone.
JAN CHOZEN BAYS is co-abbot of Great Vow Zen Monastery in Clatskanie, Oregon. She received priest’s ordination and dharma transmission from the late Taizan Maezumi Roshi. She is also a pediatrician, wife, mother, and the author of Jizo Bodhisattva and Mindful Eating.
VENERABLE BHIKKHU BODHI, an American Buddhist monk, was ordained in Sri Lanka in 1972. He has translated several important works from the Pali Canon, including the Sumyatta Nikaya (“The Connected Discourses of the Buddha”). He is the president of the Buddhist Publication Society and chair of the Buddhist Global Relief organization.
SYLVIA BOORSTEIN, PhD, is a cofounding teacher at Spirit Rock Meditation Center in Woodacre, California. She is the author of many best-selling books, including Pay Attention, for Goodness’ Sake and Happiness Is an Inside Job. She lives in California and France and travels widely teaching meditation and loving-kindness.
ELIZABETH BROWNRIGG is a novelist and essayist. Her first novel, Falling to Earth, published by Firebrand Books in 1998, was a Lambda Literary Award finalist. Her second novel, The Woman Who Loved War, was published in 2004. She received her MFA in creative writing from the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.
PEMA CHÖDRÖN is one of America’s leading Buddhist teachers and the author of many best-selling books, including The Places That Scare You, When Things Fall Apart, and Start Where You Are. Born Deirdre Blomfield-Brown in 1936, she raised a family and taught elementary school before becoming ordained as a nun in 1981. Pema Chödrön’s root teacher was Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, who appointed her abbess of the monastery he founded in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. Since his death in 1987, she has studied with Trungpa Rinpoche’s son, Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche, and her current principal teacher, Dzigar Kongtrül Rinpoche.
GAYLON FERGUSON is an acharya (senior teacher) in the Shambhala Buddhist tradition and a faculty member in Religious Studies and Interdisciplinary Studies at Naropa University. He has a doctorate in cultural anthropology from Stanford and was a contributor to Dharma, Color, and Culture: New Voices in Western Buddhism. Natural Wakefulness, excerpted here, is his first book.
ZOKETSU NORMAN FISCHER is the founder and teacher of the Everyday Zen Foundation, whose mission is to open and broaden Zen practice through what he calls “engaged renunciation.” Fischer practiced and taught at the San Francisco Zen Center for twenty-five years and served as abbot from 1995–2000. His many books include Sailing Home: Using Homer’s Odyssey to Navigate Life’s Perils and Pitfalls (prose) and I Was Blown Back (poetry).
LAURA FRASER is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in many national publications. Her most recent books are a travel memoir, An Italian Affair (2002), and its sequel, All Over the Map (2010). In 2008 she won the International Association of Culinary Professionals’ Bert Greene Award for Essay Writing.
CAROLYN ROSE GIMIAN is an author and editor living in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and the editor of many of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche’s books, including his Collected Works and Smile at Fear: Awakening the True Heart of Bravery. She is also the founding director of the Shambhala Archives, dedicated to the collection and preservation of the teachings and artifacts of Trungpa Rinpoche and associated teachers.
STAN GOLDBERG is a professor emeritus of communicative disorders at San Francisco State University. The most recent of his six books