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 I
was born in London and began my publishing career there at André
Deutsch. In 1964 I came to New York City “for a year,” worked at
Simon and Schuster for three years, and then at Alfred A. Knopf for
thirty-two more, as reprint rights director and senior editor. In
1989, while continuing as rights director at Knopf, I founded Bell
Tower, an imprint of Crown/Harmony, where I am editorial director
and have published seventy books. I left Knopf in 2000 to work as a
free-lance editor. My own two books
Nothing Left Over: A Plain and Simple
Life and Caught in the Act: Reflections on Being, Knowing, and Doing were published by
Tarcher/ Putnam in 2002 and 2004.
My interests include
tai chi chuan, yoga, therapeutic touch, East Asian brush painting,
spinning, languages (fluent in French, not so fluent in German,
Italian, Spanish, Russian, Hebrew, Latin, and Sanskrit), and
exploring the meanings of words in dictionaries and the geography of
far-away places in atlases. I have also studied English, Sanskrit,
and Hebrew calligraphy. I enjoy going to the ballet, growing
orchids, tending my plot in the community garden in Riverside Park a
few blocks away, and telling stories.
I like to travel. I
have made trips to the “rose-red city” of Petra in Jordan, to Fes in
Morocco for the World Sacred Music Festival, to a monastery for a
nine-day silent retreat, to Bali for the Arts Festival, to Havana
for New Year’s, to Rome to be with the Pope in St Peter’s for the
turn of the millennium, to China and Japan to visit Buddhist
monasteries and paint rivers and mountains, to Turkey to trace the
life of Rumi, to India and Nepal to follow in the footsteps of the
Buddha, and to many other places. On my return I write a long account of each journey
and share it with a host of friends who enjoy my trips vicariously.
Credits
Many thanks to
Sungsook Setton and Lu Wu for photographing my paintings, to
Katharine Le
Mée for the
picture taken at my Barnes & Noble book signing, to Patricia Ryan Madson for chops and a wealth of practical help, to Jane English for
creating and hosting my web page for the last few years, and to
Jessica Sinsheimer for all her hard work and her beautiful web
design.
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