Patricia Monaghan
Goddess movement pioneer, author, teacher, poet
Patricia Monaghan’s first book, The Book of Goddesses and Heroines, was published in 1980 by E.P. Dutton and was one of the first of what would be a flood of works on feminine divinity and women’s spirituality. The book has been published in two later expanded editions; Patricia is currently working on a new, greatly expanded and footnoted edition that she hopes will be the last and definitive one. The book is notable for being cross-cultural, including tens of thousands of divinities from all continents. The new edition is divided by culture and includes significant new material.
Raised in Alaska, where much of her family still lives, Patricia considers herself blessed to have learned the ecology of the taiga, the subarctic forest, in her youth. She was a writer and reporter on science and energy-related issues before turning her attention to the impact of myth on our daily lives.
The worldwide vision of the earth as feminine–as a goddess, called Gaia by the Greeks–led her to recognize the connection between ecological damage and the oppression of the feminine. Much of her work since that time has explored the role of feminine power in our world, in an inclusive and multicultural way.
Patricia’s other published nonfiction includes The Encyclopedia of Celtic Myth and Folklore (Facts on File), The Red-Haired Girl from the Bog: The Landscape of Celtic Myth and Spirit (New World Library), Meditation: The Complete Guide (New World Library), Wild Girls: The Path of the Young Goddess (Creatrix Books), and The Goddess Companion (Llewellyn Worldwide).
In addition to scholarship and nonfiction writing, Patricia is an award-winning poet whose work has been set to music and is performed around the world, most recently by folk composer Michael Smith, whose setting of Patricia’s “Songs of a Kerry Madwoman” will be released shortly with vocals by Jamie O’Reilly. Patricia’s most recent books of poetry are Homefront (Word Tech Press), a sequence of poems about the effect of war on families; an expanded edition of the award-winning Seasons of the Witch with double CD of music; and Dancing with Chaos (Salmon Poetry), which explores scientific theories of chaos in personal terms.
Patricia is an acclaimed lecturer who has appeared at hundreds of universities, festivals, bookstores and community centers around the United States and Europe. An avid traveler, Patricia has researched earth spirituality and goddess worship on three continents. She has traveled widely in Europe, especially in Ireland; she holds dual US/Irish citizenship and has edited two anthologies of contemporary Irish-American writing.
Patricia holds a PhD in literature and environment from the Union Institute and an MFA in creative writing from the University of Alaska. In her position as a member of the interdisciplinary faculty at DePaul University, Patricia teaches classes in mythology, environmental studies, and arts. She is a Senior Fellow of the Black Earth Institute, dedicated to connecting arts, spirituality, environment and politics. She lives bilocally, in Chicago and in Wisconsin, where she and her partner Michael McDermott tend a vineyard and large organic garden.
Antero Alli
author, ritualist, filmmaker, astrologer
Born 11/11/1952 in Helsinki Finland, Antero Alli is the author of ANGEL TECH, TOWARDS AN ARCHEOLOGY OF THE SOUL, ASTROLOGIK, THE VERTICAL ORACLE, and THE AKASHIC RECORD PLAYER. Antero's deep background in theatre and paratheatre have resulted in numerous original performance works since 1977 and he is currently artistic director of ParaTheatrical ReSearch, a Berkeley-based group of trained physical performers exploring asocial ritual dynamics.
Since 1991 Antero has been writing, directing and producing his own films, which include six feature fictions, three paratheatre video documents and about twenty short works. Between 1991-95 he was editor and publisher of Talking Raven Quarterly, an iconoclastic literary journal in Seattle which featured the writings of Robert Anton Wilson, Hakim Bey, and Rob Brezsny among others. Between 1992 and 2002 Antero curated the successful Nomad VideoFilm Festival, a west coast touring venue dedicated to showing experimental short films and videos. In 1996 Antero teamed up with his future wife, Sylvi to form Vertical Pool as an intermedia film, music and publishing company. He is also a world renown astrologer and currently resides in Berkeley, California.
Douglas Rushkoff
contemporary media theorist, novelist
Douglas Rushkoff analyzes, writes and speaks about the way people, cultures, and institutions create, share, and influence each other's values. He sees "media" as the landscape where this interaction takes place, and "literacy" as the ability to participate consciously in it.
Rushkoff is the author of eight best-selling books on new media and popular culture, including Cyberia, Media Virus, Playing the Future, Coercion: Why We Listen to What "They" Say, and the novels Ecstasy Club, and Exit Strategy and, most recently, Nothing Sacred: The Truth about Judaism. His graphic novel, Club Zero-G is forthcoming from Disinfo.
His commentaries air on CBS Sunday Morning and NPR's All Things Considered, and appear on the back page of Time magazine. His monthly column on cyberculture is distributed through the New York Times Syndicate and appears in over thirty countries.
Rushkoff lectures about media, art, society, and change at conferences and universities around the world. He hosts and writes documentaries for PBS, Channel Four, and the BBC.
Rushkoff's award-winning Frontline documentary "The Merchants of Cool" was one of the most watched and most talked about documentaries of the year.
He has served as an adjunct professor of communications at New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program for the past six years, as an Advisor to the United Nations Commission on World Culture, on the Board of Directors of the Media Ecology Association, and as a founding member of Technorealism. He has been awarded Senior Fellowships by the Markle Foundation and the Center for Global Communications Fellow of the International University of Japan.
He regularly appears on TV shows from NBC Nightly News and Frontline to Larry King and Politically Incorrect. Rushkoff writes for magazines and newspapers including Time, The Guardian, Esquire, Paper, GQ and The Silicon Alley Reporter, and developed the Electronic Oracle software series for HarperCollins Interactive.
Rushkoff is on the board of several new media non-profits and companies, and regularly consults on new media arts and ethics to museums, governments, and universities, as well as Sony, TCI, advertising agencies, and other Fortune 500 companies.
Rushkoff graduated magna cum laude from Princeton University, received an MFA in Directing from California Institute of the Arts, a post-graduate fellowship (MFA) from The American Film Institute, and a Director's Grant from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. He is a certified stage fight choreographer, and plays blues piano and baby guitar.
He lives with his wife, Barbara, in Brooklyn.
True Initiations Never End
