Fire Monks: Wildfires in California

Colleen Morton Busch’s nonfiction, poetry, and fiction have appeared in a wide range of publications, from literary magazines to the San Francisco Chronicle and Yoga Journal, where she was a senior editor. Busch has been a Zen student since 2000.  She is the author of Fire Monks: Zen Mind Meets Wildfire at the Gates of Tassajara.

Stephen Pyne is a professor at Arizona State University and the author of over 20 books mostly dealing with the history, ecology, and management of fire and include big-screen histories for America, Australia, Canada, Europe, and Earth overall.  Others deal with the history of exploration, notably How the Canyon Became Grand, The Ice: A Journey to Antarctica, and most recently Voyager: Seeking Newer Worlds in the Third Great Age of Discovery.  Both interests, fire and exploration, grew out of 15 seasons he worked the North Rim Longshots, a fire crew at Grand Canyon National Park.  He is currently researching a fire history of the U.S. over the past 50 years.  He teaches a graduate course on nonfiction writing, which became the basis for his book Voice and Vision. 

William Deverell is a professor of history at USC, where he specializes in the history of California and the American West and directs a scholarly institute that collaborates with the Huntington Library in San Marino. He is the author of Whitewashed Adobe: The Rise of Los Angeles and the Remaking of Its Mexican Past and Railroad Crossing: Californians and the Railroad, 1850-1910. With Greg Hise, he is co-author of Eden by Design: The 1930 Olmsted-Bartholomew Plan for the Los Angeles Region. He is past chair of the California Council for the Humanities and a recent Fellow of the John Randolph Haynes and Dora Haynes Foundation of Los Angeles. He is also a Fellow of the Los Angeles Institute for Humanities at USC.