Ben Howard

Poet and essayist Ben Howard was born in 1944 and grew up in eastern Iowa. His interest in Buddhist meditation originated in the 1970s, kindled by the prose of Peter Matthiessen and the poems of Gary Snyder. Having learned the fundamentals of sitting practice from Allen Ginsberg in 1978, he became a student of Vipassana meditation and later of Vietnamese Rinzai Zen, as taught by the Venerable Thich Nhat Hanh. More recently, he has studied Japanese Rinzai Zen with Jiro Osho Fernando Afable and Shinge Roko Sherry Chayat Roshi. In 2002 he received the jukai precepts in the Hakuin/Torei lineage of Rinzai Zen at Dai Bosatsu Zendo.

Howard holds a doctorate in English Literature from Syracuse University, where he studied with Donald Justice, Philip Booth, and William Wasserstrom. Before his retirement in 2006, he taught literature, writing, classical guitar, and Buddhist meditation at Alfred University. For the past four decades he has contributed poems, essays, articles, and reviews to leading literary journals here and abroad, including Poetry, the Sewanee Review, Poetry Ireland Review, and Shenandoah. The author of ten books, he has been the recipient of numerous awards, including the Milton Dorfman Prize in Poetry and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives with his wife, Robin Caster Howard, in the village of Alfred, New York.