Buddha and the Bard

Insight Editions is a publisher of illustrated books on photography, music, and popular culture. Elegant and informative, their books showcase the best of art, photography, and design in exquisite presentations of the bookmaker's craft. They are located in San Rafael, CA.Lauren Shufran holds an MA (English) and an MFA (Creative Writing: Poetry) from San Francisco State University, and a PhD (Early Modern British Literature) from UC Santa Cruz.  In her eight years of PhD candidacy at UCSC she taught a wide range of courses, from creative writing to Biblical Poetics in Renaissance England to The English Sonnet Sequence; but Shakespeare was the course she taught most consistently. She discovered yoga, meditation, and mindfulness practices while writing her dissertation.  Lauren’s first major publication was a book of poetry called Inter Arma (Fence Books, 2013), which won the Motherwell Prize. Her poetry has appeared in Best American Experimental Writing (Wesleyan University Press), as well as in Postmodern Culture, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Emerge: An Anthology of Writing by Lambda Fellows, and elsewhere over the years. She’s also had scholarly essays published in a handful of peer-reviewed journals.  Lauren presently works as a ghostwriter and content strategist for a startup in San Francisco.