Ruth Ozeki is a novelist, filmmaker and Zen Buddhist priest. She is the award-winning author of four novels: My Year of Meats, All Over Creation, A Tale for the Time Being, which was shortlisted for the 2013 Man Booker Prize and translated into 28 languages, and The Book of Form and Emptiness. She has also written a short memoir, The Face: A Time Code. She is affiliated with the Everyday Zen Foundation and lives in Northampton, Massachusetts, where she teaches creative writing at Smith College and is the Grace Jarcho Ross 1933 Professor of Humanities.ruthozeki.com

Ozeki shows more courage than most in melding a well-crafted, often comic story of the personal with the political