KATY BUTLER has written for the New Yorker, the Science Times section of the New York Times; Mother Jones, Vogue, Village Voice, Tricycle, the Buddhist Review; More magazine; and Psychotherapy Networker magazine. She regularly leads writing workshops at Esalen Institute.
She was a finalist in 2004 for the National Magazine Award for Personal Service. In 2005, she held writing residencies at Blue Mountain Center and Mesa Refuge. In 2006, she won the first-place National Mental Health Association Award for best researched article. In 2008, she will hold a two-month invitational writing residency at Hedgebrook Foundation. Her New York Times articles on human behavior were frequently the most emailed articles of the day.
In 2008, she will lead workshops at the Psychotherapy Networker Symposium in Washington D.C. in March; at the Nieman Foundation conference on Narrative Journalism in Boston in March; and at Esalen Institute in November. (See workshops.)
Her writing has appeared in The New York Times Sunday Book Review, Salon.com, NPR, the L.A. Times Sunday Magazine, Vogue, the Village Voice, and many other national publications. She lives in Mill Valley, California, where she works as a writer, teacher, and editor.
A Buddhist for more than 25 years, she was lay ordained by the Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh and has co-led small meditation groups.
Born in South Africa and raised in Oxford, England and Boston, Mass., she attended Sarah Lawrence College and holds a B.A. and an honorary M.A. from Wesleyan University in Connecticut.
As a reporter for The San Francisco Bay Guardian and The San Francisco Chronicle in the 1980s, she covered city politics, Peoples’ Temple, the Moscone and Milk assassinations, urban affairs, and gentrification. Her AIDS reporting, in collaboration with Randy Shilts, was nominated by the Chronicle for the Pulitzer Prize.
She left the Chronicle in 1994 to report and write for magazines, concentrating on literary nonfiction, personal essays and social criticism informed by psychology and Buddhism. Her writing often explores addiction, meditation, and how people transform themselves and their lives, especially at the boundary of psychology and spiritual practice.
Her private writing coaching clients have published widely. One was included in the “Top 20 Underreported Stories” of 2001; another won a first-place award from best personal essay the National Mental Health Association. She is not currently taking writing clients.
©2007 Katy Butler
Main Page
