Robert Aitken is a retired master of the Diamond Sangha, a Buddhist community he and his wife Anne founded in Hawai’i in 1959. The author of more than ten books, including The Morning Star, Zen Wave, Vegetable Roots Discourse,and Miniatures of a Zen Master, he has encouraged the real-world application of Buddhist principles through social justice and peace movements, in which he has been very active throughout his life.

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Laura Allen is a San Francisco Bay Area gardener, activist, and elementary school teacher. She holds a B.A. in Environmental Science from the University of California at Berkeley and a teaching credential from the New College of California. Allen received certificates in photovoltaic design and installation, wind power, and microhydro power from Solar Energy International. Co-author of the notorious Guerrilla Greywater Girls Guide to Water and co-editor of Dam Nation: Dispatches from the Water Underground, she lives in Northern California.

Author of Dead in Desemboque, Eddy Arellano lives in Dixon, New Mexico. As Bobby Rabyd, he created the Internet’s first interactive novel, Sunshine ’69. Arellano is the head of the Academy of Literacy & Cultural Studies at the University of New Mexico, Taos.

Ronald Aronson is the author or editor of eight books, including Jean-Paul Sartre: Philosophy in the World, Camus and Sartre: The Story of a Friendship and the Quarrel That Ended It, and Living Without God: New Directions for Atheists, Agnostics, Secularists, and the Undecided. Distinguished Professor of the History of Ideas at Wayne State University, he has lectured widely, including at the University of KwaZulu-Natal and other South African universities. He lives in Michigan.

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Baisao was born in 1675 and died in Kyoto in 1763. He was, by the time of his death, one of the most revered and accomplished poets of his time. His poems, memoirs and letters have been collected by Norman Waddell in The Old Tea Seller.

Winner of a National Book Award, Donald Barthelme published sixteen books, including Sixty Stories, which was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Counterpoint has published three anthologies of his work: Not-Knowing, Flying to America, and The Teachings of Don B. Barthelme died in 1989.

Judy Fong Bates came to Canada from China as a young girl and grew up in several small Ontario towns. She is the author of a collection of short stories, China Dog, and a novel, Midnight at the Dragon Café. Her stories have been broadcast on CBC Radio and published in literary journals and anthologies. Judy Fong Bates lives in Toronto.

Wendell Berry, an essayist, novelist, and poet, has been honored with the T.S. Eliot Award, the Aitken Taylor Award for poetry, and the John Hay Award of the Orion Society. He lives with his wife on a farm in Henry County, Kentucky.

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Beryl Singleton Bissell has been a columnist for the Cook County News Herald in Minnesota for the past eight years. Her work has been published in the Trenton Times, Lake Superior Magazine, Sun Magazine, Minnesota Monthly, and National Catholic Reporter and appears in the anthology Surviving Ophelia. Her memoir, published by Counterpoint, is The Scent of God. Bissell lives in Schroeder, Minnesota.

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Greg Bottoms is the author of several books, including Fight Scenes, Sentimental Heartbroken Rednecks, and the critically acclaimed literary memoir Angelhead, one of Esquire’s top nonfiction titles of 2000.