General

Booksigning and Talk with Author Starhawk and her new book: Earth Path: Grounding Your Spirit in the Rhythms of Nature.

Wednesday, 08 December 2004
7:00 PM - 9:30 PM

Organizer: Santa Barbara Permaculture Network,Student Sustainability Coalit

Starhawk, committed global justice activist and organizer, is the author or coauthor of ten books, including The Spiral Dance, The Fifth Sacred Thing, and the award-winning Webs of Power: Notes from the Global Uprising. Her latest is Earth Path: Grounding Your Spirit in the Rhythms of Nature. She is a veteran of progressive movements, from anti-war to anti-nukes, is a highly influential voice in the revival of earth-based spirituality and Goddess religion, and has brought many innovative techniques of spirituality and magic to her political work. Her web site is www.starhawk.org.

Starhawk is a veteran of progressive movements, from anti-war to anti-nukes, and is deeply committed to bringing the techniques and creative power of spirituality to political activism. Her work in progressive movements spans over 35 years, beginning as an organizer in her high school during the days of the Vietnam War. In the years since, she has organized, trained protestors, and been on the front lines of antinuclear actions at Diablo Canyon, Livermore Weapons Lab, Vandenberg Air Force Base, and the Nevada Test Site, among others. She traveled to Nicaragua with Witness for Peace in 1984 and made two trips to El Salvador to give ongoing support for sustainability programs. For a number of years she has traveled to the Occupied Territories of Palestine and to Israel, working for peace with local activists of both sides. A main focus for the last several years has been the global justice movement; Starhawk has taken part in many of the major actions, including those in Seattle, Washington DC, Quebec City, Genoa, New York City, Cancun, Mexico, and Miami. She co-founded RANT, Root Activists' Network of Trainers (www.rant.org), and teaches non-violent direct action trainings for these demonstrations, as well as for groups throughout the US, Canada, Mexico, Europe, Palestine, and South America.

She is active in the revived American peace movement, and contributes her time to countless environmental and land use issues. Together with Penny Livingston-Stark and Erik Ohlsen, she coteaches EAT, Earth Activist Training, intensive seminars that combine permaculture design, effective activism, and earth-based spirituality (www.earthactivisttraining.org).

Starhawk is perhaps best known as an articulate pioneer in the revival of earth-based spirituality and Goddess religion. Besides her inspiring, much-read books, she is a cofounder of Reclaiming, an activist branch of modern Pagan religion, and continues to work closely with the Reclaiming community (www.reclaiming.org). She consulted on and contributed to the popular trio of films known as the Women's Spirituality series (directed by Donna Read): Goddess Remembered, The Burning Times, and Full Circle. Starhawk and Donna Read recently formed their own film company, Belili Productions. Their first release is Signs Out of Time (2004), a documentary on the life of archaeologist Marija Gimbutas, the scholar whose discoveries sparked the Goddess movement (www.belili.org). Starhawk and Donna are at work on their next film, an introduction to permaculture.

Starhawk has also recorded several tapes and CDs; the latest are "Wicca for Beginners" (2002) and "Wiccan Rituals and Blessings" (2003), both produced by Sounds True. A songwriter on occasion, quite a few of her songs and chants turn up in rituals across the globe; they are included in songbooks and hymnals, covered by other artists, and recorded by the Reclaiming musical community.
Starhawk travels internationally teaching magic, the tools of ritual, and the skills of activism. She lives part-time San Francisco, in a collective house with her partner and friends, and part-time in a little hut in the woods in western Sonoma County, California, where she practices permaculture in her extensive gardens, and writes. Her website is www.starhawk.org.
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Starhawk is one of the most respected voices in modern earth-based spirituality. She is also well-known as a global justice activist and organizer, whose work and writings have inspired many to action. She is the author or coauthor of ten books, including The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess, long considered the essential text for the Neo-Pagan movement, and the now-classic ecotopian novel The Fifth Sacred Thing. Starhawk's newest book is The Earth Path: Grounding Your Spirit in the Rhythms of Nature.


Her works have been translated into German, Danish, Dutch, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, French, and Japanese. Her essays are reprinted across the world, and have been included in numerous anthologies. Starhawk's writing is influential and has been quoted by hundreds of other authors, turning up in magazines, trade and academic press, and even inspirational calendars. Her books are often found in college curriculums. The Spiral Dance has been continuously in-print for over twenty-five years and revised twice; in 1999 HarperSanFrancisco published the Twentieth Anniversary Edition. Beacon, which has published three editions of Dreaming the Dark: Magic, Sex, and Politics, reports that the book remains a backlist bestseller. Truth or Dare: Encounters with Power, Authority, and Mystery won the Media Alliance Meritorious Achievement Award for nonfiction in 1988. Starhawk's first novel, The Fifth Sacred Thing, won the Lambda award for best Gay and Lesbian Science Fiction in 1994. Her second novel, Walking to Mercury, was published by Bantam in 1997. She cowrote The Pagan Book of Living and Dying, an anthology compiled by Reclaiming and M. Macha NightMare. Together with Anne Hill and Diane Baker, she cowrote Circle Round: Raising Children in the Goddess Tradition. In 2000 HarperSF published The Twelve Wild Swans: A Journey to the Realm of Magic, Healing, and Action, cowritten with Hilary Valentine. Many of Starhawk's best political essays--credited with helping the global justice movement find and define itself--were collected into her book Webs of Power: Notes from the Global Uprising. At the Book Expo America, Webs of Power won a 2003 Nautilus Award from the trade association NAPRA.

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Bibliography: Starhawk's Books and Novels:
* The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess. San Francisco. HarperSanFrancisco. 1979, 1989, and 1999 editions. German, Danish, Portuguese, Japanese, and Spanish editions.
* Dreaming the Dark: Magic, Sex, and Politics. Boston. Beacon. 1982, 1988, 1997 editions. French edition, 2003.
* Truth or Dare: Encounters with Power, Authority, and Mystery. San Francisco. HarperSanFrancisco. 1988.
* The Fifth Sacred Thing. New York. Bantam. 1993. German, Italian, and Portuguese editions.
* Walking to Mercury. New York. Bantam. 1997.
* The Pagan Book of Living and Dying, cowritten with M. Macha NightMare and the Reclaiming Collective. San Francisco. HarperSanFrancisco. 1997.
* Circle Round: Raising Children in the Goddess Tradition, cowritten with Anne Hill and Diane Baker. Illustrated by Sara Ceres Boore. New York. Bantam. 1998.
* The Twelve Wild Swans: A Journey to the Realm of Magic, Healing, and Action, cowritten with Hilary Valentine. San Francisco. HarperSanFrancisco. 2000. Dutch edition, forthcoming in German and Spanish.
* Webs of Power: Notes from the Global Uprising. Victoria, Canada. New Society Publishers. 2002.
* Earth Path: Grounding Your Spirit in the Rhythms of Nature; HarperSanFrancisco. October, 2004.

Location:
Santa Barbara Central Library (downtown), Faulkner Gallery 40 E Anapamu

Cost: $5

URL: http://www.sbpermaculture.org