Writing as Enlightenment: Buddhist American Literature into the Twenty-first Century

Contributors

Contributors Jane Falk is Lecturer in English Composition at The University of Akron, at Akron, Ohio. She has contributed an appreciation of Philip Whalen’s The Diamond Noodle to Continuous Flame, a tribute volume, as well as biographies of Whalen to the Encyclopedia of Beat Literature, The Greenwood Encyclopedia of American Poets and Poetry, and The Collected Poems of Philip Whalen. Her essay on Zen influences on Whalen’s poetry is included in The Emergence of Buddhist American Literature. An essay on Joanne Kyger’s video, Descartes, is forthcoming. Current research interests include the work of Joanne Kyger, Lew Welch, and Philip Whalen. Allan Johnston lives near Chicago, where he teaches literature and writing. He holds a PhD in English from the University of California, Davis. His scholarly writings have appeared in journals such as Twentieth Century Literature, College Literature, ISLE, AUMLA, and Review of Contemporary Fiction. Besides his academic writing, he is a poet with two published collections and poems in Poetry, Poetry East, Rattle, Rhino, and several other journals. He is currently president of the Society for the Philosophical Study of Education and editor of the Journal for the Philosophical Study of Education. Julia Martin teaches English and creative writing at the University of the Western Cape in South Africa. She has a special interest in ecological literacy, narrative scholarship and has a long association with the work of Gary Snyder. Her publications include Writing Home (2002), a collection of narrative essays, and A Millimetre of Dust (2008), a travel memoir about visiting archaeological sites in the Northern Cape. She is also the editor of Ecological Responsibility: A Dialogue with Buddhism (1997), an international collection of essays and talks. Linda F. Selzer is Associate Professor of English at the Pennsylvania State University-University Park. She is the author of Charles Johnson in Context (University of Massachusetts Press, 2009), and co-editor of New Essays on the African American Novel (Palgrave, 2008). Her work on African-American literature 185 186 List of Contributors and culture has appeared in scholarly collections and in journals such as the African American Review, Callaloo, Massachusetts Review, MELUS, and Rhetoric Review. In 2003 she received the Darwin Turner Award for the year’s best essay in African American Review. Jonathan Stalling is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Oklahoma and is the author of Poetics of Emptiness (Fordham), Grotto Heaven (Chax), and the forthcoming book 吟歌丽诗/Yíngēlìshī: Sinophonic English Poetry and Poetics (Counterpath), and a co-editor of The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry (Fordham). He is also the co-founder and an editor of Chinese Literature Today Journal and the editor of the CLT Book Series from Oklahoma University Press. Gary Storhoff is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Connecticut , Stamford Campus. He has widely published in American, AfricanAmerican , and Ethnic American literature. He is the author of Understanding Charles Johnson (2004), co-editor of The Emergence of Buddhist American Literature (2009, 2010) and American Buddhism as a Way of Life (2010) with John Whalen-Bridge. He is currently working on a book provisionally titled The Family Crucible: Family Processes in William Faulkner and Toni Morrison. Jan Willis is Professor of Religion at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut . She has studied with Tibetan Buddhists in India, Nepal, Switzerland and the United States for more than four decades, and has taught courses in Buddhism for thirty-seven years. She is the author of The Diamond Light: An Introduction to Tibetan Buddhist Meditation (1972), On Knowing Reality: The Tattvartha Chapter of Asanga’s Bodhisattvabhumi (1979), Enlightened Beings: Life Stories from the Ganden Oral Tradition (1995); and the editor of Feminine Ground: Essays on Women and Tibet (1989). Additionally, Willis has published a number of articles and essays on various topics in Buddhism—Buddhist meditation, women and Buddhism, and Buddhism and race. In 2001, she authored the memoir, Dreaming Me: An African American Woman’s Spiritual Journey (re-issued October 1, 2008 by Wisdom Publications as Dreaming Me: Black, Baptist, and Buddhist—One Woman’s Spiritual Journey). In December 2000, Time magazine named Willis one of six “spiritual innovators for the new millennium.” In 2003, she was a recipient of Wesleyan University’s Binswanger Prize for Excellence in Teaching. In September 2005, Newsweek magazine’s “Spirituality in America” issue included a profile of her and, in its May 2007 edition, Ebony magazine named Willis one of its “Power 150” most influential African Americans. John Whalen...