Writer, Speaker, Traveler.
Born on a summer evening in Andalusia to an American father and a Tibetan mother, I lived in Spain and Darjeeling, then moved to the U.S. at age three. My fiction, essays, and interviews have been published by The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Catapult, Guernica, Narrative, Tin House, AGNI, and Granta, among others, and I’m a contributing editor at Tricycle. My writing also appears in The Penguin Book of Modern Tibetan Essays, Women in Clothes (Riverhead), and American Dragons (HarperCollins), and has been listed in The Best American Essays; a translation of fiction by Reinaldo Arenas was published in Old Rosa (Grove).
Traveling in Bardo, my book about the art of living in an impermanent world, is forthcoming from Grand Central/Hachette on September 9. Exploring how we can find meaning and happiness in the face of the inevitable changes that life brings, I interweave discussions of marriage and friendship, parents and children, and work and creativity with stories of my Tibetan ancestors and the Buddhist teachings on the transitory nature of existence. My great-grandfather was a close friend of the Thirteenth Dalai Lama and helped bring The Tibetan Book of the Dead (a guide to navigating bardo between-states) to the West.
I speak and teach workshops in the U.S., Asia, and Europe, at The Rubin Museum of Art, the Asia Society, Princeton, Columbia, Oxford, The American University of Paris, and La Porte Peinte Centre pour les Arts, among others. I studied Comparative Literature at Princeton and Creative Writing at the University of Michigan. My travels and work have taken me around the world, to India, Tibet, France, Spain, Cuba, Thailand, Bali, and many other countries. I’m a longtime resident of Tokyo.