Kate Lila Wheeler was born in Oklahoma and raised in Latin America. She is both an American writer and authorized in two Buddhist lineages as a meditation teacher. She’s one of three coordinators of the four-year teacher training program at Spirit Rock Meditation Center, the most diverse such program in the history of Western Buddhism. As a writer, she has received numerous literary awards and fellowships for her fiction and journalistic work: two O. Henry Awards, inclusion in The Best American Short Stories collection, The Best of Outside, Granta Best Young American Novelists, The Best American Travel Writing, The Best Women’s Travel Writing, a Pushcart Prize, Whiting Award, Guggenheim Fellowship, Radcliffe Institute Fellowship and a working residency at Smith College for Spring 2019. Her fiction includes the short story collection, Not Where I Started From (1997, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) with several award-winning stories; and a novel, When Mountains Walk (2001, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). She edited Nixon Under the Bodhi Tree, the first collection of Buddhist fiction in recent memory, by Wisdom Publications; and two books by her Burmese meditation master, Sayadaw U Pandita.