Featured Contributors

Sun Bai 

When creating the striking Green Tara for this issue’s cover, Sun Bai “wasn’t interested in illustrating a specific teaching.” Instead, she wanted to “create a feeling: something calm, compassionate, and full of life.” The comic author and illustrator’s signature style is rooted in feelings: Melancholia, romance, and tension are par for the course. Originally from Shenyang in northeast China, she now lives in France and splits her time between Lille and Paris. Her illustrations have appeared in publications such as the New York Times and Telo Magazine. Though she does not identify as a Buddhist, she sees a certain synergy between its principles and her creative motifs. “Over time, I realized that some of the questions I’m interested in seem to overlap with things Buddhism has been asking for a long time, questions about time, memory, and impermanence,” she told Tricycle.

Josh Korda

For over a decade, Josh Korda has been consistently contributing to Tricycle through written teachings, online retreats and courses, and podcast guest appearances. The Theravada teacher began garnering attention in 2005 when he took the reins as the lead teacher of Dharma Punx NYC—a sangha that blends Buddhism with an antiestablishment punk ethos. In an interview with Asia Society, Korda asserted that “People like punks, recovering addicts, and members of anarchist and LGBTQ communities didn’t want to go into sanghas where everybody was in their 60s and looked like an Upper West Side therapist.” An addict before finding the dharma, Korda specializes in teachings and counseling aimed at addiction, past trauma, and difficult emotions. His article for this issue, “What’s the Point?,” tackles existential questions about the meaning of being alive. Korda lives in New York City with his wife, Kathy Cherry, who is also a Buddhist meditation teacher and counselor. 

Pelumi Sholagbade

In “My Good Luck African Braiding Sangha” Pelumi Sholagbade draws on Buddhist teachings to reframe their relationship with traditional African hair braiding, a lengthy process rich both in community and physical discomfort. Sholagbade graduated from the College of William & Mary in 2023 with a major in English language and literature. Since graduating, they have been pursuing a career as an educator and self-publishing, on Substack, under the name please be normal. Describing their spirituality as “syncretic” and identifying as a “fledgling Buddhist,” Sholagbade incorporates Zen and vipassana meditation, the Indigenous Yoruba practices of their tribe, and Evangelical teachings into their spiritual worldview. “One of the things I love most about Buddhism is how its sacred teachings are made evident in the most mundane and day-to-day practices,” they told Tricycle, “ones inevitably shaped by the myriad of cultures we might call our own.”