Featured Contributors

Wang Ping

Since graduating from Long Island University in 1987 with a master’s in English Literature, Wang Ping has earned a PhD from New York University and authored numerous books exploring culture, gender, sexuality, the environment, and her Chinese heritage. During her twenty-one years teaching at Macalester College, she founded the “Kinship of Rivers” project, which promotes community and ecological awareness along China’s Yangtze River and the Mississippi in the United States. Growing up on a small island in the East China Sea nurtured Wang’s love of nature. That, coupled with her Buddhist background and celebrated poetry career, fostered a friendship with Gary Snyder, invoked in “Riprap.”

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Bhante G

Born in Sri Lanka in 1927, Bhante Henepola Gunaratana, affectionately known as “Bhante G,” has been teaching and leading Buddhist communities for more than sixty years. Following his ordination at age 20, Gunaratana left Sri Lanka for missionary work with the Maha Bodhi Society. His travels led him to the United States, where he attended graduate school, lectured at universities, and founded the Bhavana Society, a retreat center in West Virginia. Reflecting on opening the center in a 2021 interview with Tricycle, he mused, “I have done many, many, many good things, but this is the best.” He is widely lauded, however, for his accessible “In Plain English” guides to the dharma. Dependent Origination in Plain English is excerpted in “Clinging.”

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Miya Ando

Multimedia artist Miya Ando grew up dividing her time between two worlds: a California redwood forest and a Buddhist monastery in Japan, where her grandfather was head priest. After studying at University of California, Berkeley, and Yale, Ando reconnected to her matrilineal heritage, which includes fifteen generations of swordsmiths, by returning to Japan to apprentice with a master metalsmith. A rare opportunity for a woman and a biracial person, it inspired Ando’s path as an artist. Her work, featured in “The Art of Impermanence,” evokes themes of impermanence, transformation, and transcendence, with natural elements—clouds, rain, flowers, the moon—depicted in colorful transitory states.

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Ada Limón 

For Ada Limón, the stress of balancing writing with a full-time career in the New York magazine world led to chronic high blood pressure, until in 2007 she landed at Tibet House’s Tuesday night meditation with Sharon Salzberg. “Her work in loving-kindness, or metta, proved very useful to me, and metta is still probably my go-to meditation,” Limón says in “Where the Light Comes From.” Now the 24th Poet Laureate of the United States, Limón views her work, which includes selecting poems to be engraved on national park benches, as an invitation to slow down and be present. For her recent collection, You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World, Limón commissioned work from fifty poets on the theme of connecting to the world around us.