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 and at the Book Passage in Corte Madera, CA.

In 2004, she was a finalist for a National Magazine Award (the Pulitzer Prize of magazine writing) for writing about applying traditional religious practices to the chaos of modern life. "Best Buddhist Writing 2005" included her first-person essay on spirituality, nature, and Mt. Tamalpais. In 2006, the National Mental Health Association honored her with an award for research excellence. In 2007, she won a Meredith Corporation award for Creative Excellence, for a feminist memoir published in MORE magazine, on caregiving her aging parents. In 2008, she won an Elizabeth George Foundation literary award for her lifetime body of work.

Her writing has also appeared in The Pacific Sun, Salon.com, National Public Radio, The San Francisco Chronicle, the Marin Independent Journal, The Los Angeles Times Sunday Magazine, Coevolution Quarterly/The Whole Earth Review, and other respected national publications. Her New York Times articles on addiction, neuroscience and human behavior were often the most emailed articles of the day. She has lived for more than 20 years 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.

 

 

©2007 Katy Butler

 

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