Charles Upton, born in San Francisco, California in 1948, is a poet (a protégée of the Beats), a veteran of the peace movement and the psychedelic/New Age counterculture, an activist, and a lifelong student of metaphysics and world religion. His entire formal education, from nursery school through high school, was provided by the Catholic Church. He has published four books of poetry and fifteen in the genres of metaphysics, mythopoetic exegesis, spiritual psychology, Islam, Sufism and "metaphysics and social criticism". In the 1980's he participated (as a Christian) in the movement against U.S. intervention in Central America and the church-based sanctuary movement for Central American refugees. In 1988 he entered Islam and joined a Persian Sufi order. Also in the late 80s, he became involved with the "Traditionalist" or "Perennialist" school of writers on comparative religion and traditional metaphysics. In the 1990's he spent two years working with the homeless in Marin County, California, his home for most of his life till he moved with his wife, Jennifer Doane Upton, to Lexington, Kentucky in 2004. In 2010, after the death of his first shaykh, he joined a second Sufi order (Sunni). He is co-editor of The Covenants of the Prophet Muhammad with the Christians of the World by Dr. John Andrew Morrow [Angelico, 2013], and conceiver of the Covenants Initiative based on it, an international movement of Muslims to protect persecuted Christians.