Eve Ensler + Koshin Paley Ellison

In this evening of personal storytelling, playwright and activist Eve Ensler and Zen teacher Sensei Koshin Paley Ellison recount how they came to terms with painful truths that they have carried with them, hidden, for much of their lives. Together with moderator Eddie Gonzalez, Engagement Manager for On Being and the Civil Conversations Project, they address what this personal dance of inner/outer truth-telling might teach us about how we can approach our differences and work towards healing our fractured society.

The two authors will be signing their books The Apology (Eve Ensler) and Wholehearted (Koshin Paley Ellison) after the program.

This program is supported by Eileen Caulfield Schwab.

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About the Speakers

Eve Ensler, Tony Award”“winning playwright, performer, and activist, is the author of one of the most influential works of the 20th century, The Vagina Monologues, translated into over 48 languages, performed in over 140 countries, including sold-out runs at both Off-Broadway’s Westside Theater and on London’s West End. This experience inspired her to create V-Day, a global activist movement to stop violence against women and girls. One Billion Rising, initiated in 2012, continues to be the largest mass action campaign against violence against women and girls. Annually, activists rise in 200 countries through dance and creative expression. Other plays include The Good Body , Emotional Creature, O.P.C., Avocado, and In the Body of the World, based on her memoir. Ensler’s most recent memoir, The Apology, has been hailed a “transfixing, appalling, revelatory, and cathartic performance [which] deepens her mission of transmuting her pain into clarion stories that engender understanding, openness, healing, and liberation.”

Sensei Koshin Paley Ellison, MFA, LMSW, DMIN, is an author, Zen teacher, Jungian psychotherapist, and Certified Chaplaincy Educator. Koshin co-founded the New York Zen Center for Contemplative Care, serving through contemplative approaches to care through education, direct service, and meditation practice (www.zencare.org). He is currently on the faculty of the University of Arizona Medical School’s Center for Integrative Medicine’s Integrative Medicine Fellowship and the faculty of the Integrative Medicine Fellowship of the Academy of Integrative Health and Medicine, and he is a visiting professor at the McGovern Center for Humanities and Ethics at the University of Texas Health Science Center of Houston Medical School. Koshin is the author of Wholehearted: Slow Down, Help Out, Wake Up (Wisdom Publications, 2019). He is also the co-editor of Awake at the Bedside: Contemplative Teachings on Palliative and End of Life Care (Wisdom Publications, 2016). His work has been featured in the New York Times, PBS, Tricycle and others. He serves on the Board of Directors at the New York Zen Center for Contemplative Care and Barre Center for Buddhist Studies.

Eddie Gonzalez, Engagement Manager for On Being and the Civil Conversations Project, has a keen interest in the dance between inner and outer life, the stories we tell ourselves, and the stories we tell each other. He joins the On Being Impact Lab after a decade of work around stories and spiritual care, most recently at StoryCorps, where he worked across the United States and Canada to help individuals and organizations create space for reflective conversations through community-based storytelling and audio recording projects. Before StoryCorps he was a hospice chaplain and received his clinical pastoral education while earning an MFA in creative writing.