Bio

 

I was born in New York in 1956 but grew up in Mass­a­chu­setts in a Puer­to Rican fam­i­ly, a nice lit­tle cross-blend­ing of cul­tures, and enjoyed the rare gift of a hap­py childhood—short on dra­ma but long on enter­tain­ment. Things real­ly got inter­est­ing, how­ev­er, at the begin­ning of my sec­ond year of col­lege when I was ini­ti­at­ed into yog­ic med­i­ta­tion. I was an eigh­teen-year-old psych major in a pres­ti­gious uni­ver­si­ty, but from the moment I learned med­i­ta­tion all I real­ly want­ed to be was a yogi. When the school year fin­ished, I freaked out my par­ents by sell­ing every­thing I owned except my gui­tar and board­ed a cross-coun­try bus for a three-month inten­sive train­ing in yog­ic prac­tice (all things con­sid­ered, they we’re pret­ty cool about it). When I was twen­ty I went to India to meet my guru, Shrii Shrii Anan­damur­ti, and that sealed the deal. Since then I’ve spent my life hang­ing out with saints and yogis and doing my best to nav­i­gate the spir­i­tu­al path. Exact­ly how much of their lus­ter has rubbed off is debat­able, but it’s been a fas­ci­nat­ing jour­ney that has brought me into con­tact with some of the great­est spir­i­tu­al teach­ers of our time and an end­less parade of col­or­ful char­ac­ters in search of enlight­en­ment, enough to peo­ple my nov­els for the next sev­er­al lifetimes.

Along the way I’ve taught yoga and med­i­ta­tion in at least six dif­fer­ent lan­guages on four dif­fer­ent con­ti­nents, worked as a street musi­cian in Europe and Asia, and even posed as an Eng­lish teacher for a year when I was fin­ish­ing up my MFA in the ear­ly nineties, but even­tu­al­ly I set­tled into my ver­sion of the writer’s life: half the year on my farm in Puer­to Rico and the oth­er half on my farm in Brazil, giv­ing the occa­sion­al sem­i­nar and host­ing spir­i­tu­al retreats but most­ly min­ing my imag­i­na­tion for the sto­ries that have tak­en up res­i­dence there over the years, dra­mat­ic reen­act­ments of our col­lec­tive jour­ney toward the awak­en­ing of con­scious­ness. I’ve had sev­er­al char­ac­ters in my sto­ries tell me that lit­er­a­ture can be a real ser­vice to human­i­ty. I hope they’re right. The only way I can jus­ti­fy spend­ing all this time in front of a com­put­er, wan­der­ing through the shift­ing land­scapes of my imag­i­na­tion, is by tak­ing it on faith that my books can make a dif­fer­ence in people’s lives, that in some small way they can help to spark the flow­er­ing of con­scious­ness that is the real sto­ry of our race. If they can do that then noth­ing could make me hap­pi­er. That’s what I’m here for.