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Barbara Gates’s recent book Already
Home: A Topography of Spirit and Place (Shambhala Publications,
June 2003) comes out of years of writing, editorial projects, Buddhist
practice, and research into the ecology and history of her home place in
the San Francisco Bay Area. Over the past twenty years, Gates has written
for and edited the Inquiring Mind, a journal of Buddhist meditation (global
circulation 40,000). As joint founder and coeditor-in-chief of this semiannual
journal with Wes Nisker, author of Crazy Wisdom, Buddha's Nature,
and The Big Bang, The Buddha and the Baby Boom, she has played a
significant role in introducing Buddhist ideas and making them accessible
to thousands of readers in the English-speaking world. |
Gates’s writing is informed by twenty-nine years of Buddhist mindfulness
practice under the guidance of meditation teachers such as Joseph Goldstein,
Jack Kornfield, Sharon Salzberg, and more recently, Gil Fronsdal and Ajahn
Amaro. Through preparing talks and interviews for publication, Gates
is connected with many of the key voices that are bringing Buddhism to
the West. She has conducted interviews with Buddhist teachers from Thich
Nhat Hanh and Jon Kabat-Zinn to Gary Snyder and Daniel Goleman. She has
edited talks of luminaries from Ram Dass and Robert Thurman to Susan Griffin
and Allen Ginsberg.
In her free-lance business as an editor, she has worked with other Buddhist
teachers: The Dalai Lama with Dr. Howard Cutler (The Art of Happiness)
Joanna Macy (Widening Circles) Jack Kornfield (A Path With Heart) and Sharon
Salzberg (Lovingkindness).
Gates’s published works include Changing Learning, Changing Lives:
A High School Women’s Curriculum from the Group School (Feminist Press,
1979) which she co-wrote with Adria Steinberg and Susan Klaw, two of the
other teachers with whom she founded and taught at The Group School
in Cambridge. Her articles from Inquiring Mind have been included in anthologies
of American Buddhist writings published by Shambhala Publications and North
Atlantic Books. She has been working for the past eight years on
researching and writing Already Home. Gates was born in Manhattan in 1946,
and grew up between New York City with her mother and Williamstown,
Massachusetts with her father who taught at Williams College. She
received in B.A. from Bennington College (1967) and her M.A at the University
of Education at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst (1978).
She taught high school for twenty years, beginning at the Shady Hill School
in Cambridge, and most recently at the Urban School of San Francisco. Over
the past eighteen years, she has focused on her editing, writing, and raising
her now fifteen-year-old daughter. She lives in the Ocean View neighborhood
of Berkeley, California with her husband Patrick O'Donnell, her daughter
Caitlin and her dog Cleo. |
