Marilyn Stablein left Berkeley as a teenager to travel overland to India. After seven years in the Himalayas in the post-Beat 1960's she wrote Sleeping in Caves, a memoir, The Census Taker Traveler's Tales, and Night Travels to Tibet an ongoing sequence of prose poems based on dreams."The funniest, best, truest (and secretly truest) writing ever done on life in India" --Gary Snyder Splitting Hard Ground: New Poems won the New Mexico Book Award and the National Federation of Press Women Award. She is also a widely exhibited visual artist working with artist books many of which are based on her collage journals. She teaches her popular memoir workshop "Looking Back/Looking Within: Writing Your Life Stories" and is a frequent speaker and reader at schools, colleges and libraries around the country and abroad.