Emergence: The Winter 2015/2016 Issue

MC Yogi appears on the cover of the Winter 2015/2016 issue of Emergence, which revolves around yoga, spirituality, and action.

In addition to touring the world with his music, MC Yogi runs a yoga studio in Point Reyes Station, CA. He has taught yoga at diverse venues, from festivals and museums to the White House (yes, that White House).

You won’t want to miss our feature Q&A with him—he dives deep into our questions about his music, Gandhi’s activism, and what change looks like for him.

This latest issue of Emergence is being packaged and addressed—it should be reaching mailboxes very soon. Not a regular donor lined up to receive the print edition? You’ll still be able to see the whole issue: we’ll share the PDF version with you in early February.

Thanks to these key contributors to our Winter 2015/2016 issue:

Sally Armbrecht: As a copy editor, Sally has a hawk’s eye for sentence structure, style, and grammar. She lives and works in Finland, but she provides copy editing services for English-language clients everywhere via Singing House Productions.

Ellie Cross: Ellie sees art as a tool in creating a more just world—she has done research around art activism and taught art in Latin America and Asia. Two of her illustrations grace our Winter issue. Learn more about her work.

Todd Diehl: A member of our Strategic Advisory Council, Todd is based in Texas, where he is an AVID educator. Todd contributes his talents to the Metta Center in various ways, from consulting to blogging. Lucky for us, we can turn to him for his fantastic proofreading skills too.

David Golding: David is a PhD student in the Education and Social Justice program at Lancaster University. He teaches Peace Studies, International Development, and Sociology for the University of Colombo and the University of London in Sri Lanka. For our Winter issue, David wrote an essay about mindfulness meditation.

Tameka Lawson: As a yoga teacher, Tameka works in non-traditional spaces. She offers the transformational and community-building power of yoga wherever it’s needed, from street corners to police stations. She writes about her experiences in bringing yoga to the hard-pressed neighborhood of Englewood in Chicago.

Okke Ornstein: Okke is a veteran media producer and journalist whose  reports have repeatedly been nominated for European broadcasting awards. His latest work for NTR has taken him to Syria, where he traveled with a Dutch aid organization in 2013, and Greece, where he met refugees and trekked with them through Europe. His photos of people arriving on the shores of Greece provide the visual backdrop to Kimberlyn David’s essay about refugees.

Robert Shetterly: Robert’s painting of humane educator Zoe Weil appears alongside Stephanie Van Hook’s interview of Zoe in the Winter issue. That painting is part of Robert’s portrait series Americans Who Tell the Truth, a project he launched with an image of Walt Whitman in 2002 and continues building upon. Learn more about Robert and his work in our Q&A with him.

Patty Somlo: A former journalist, Patty is a fiction and creative nonfiction writer based in Sonoma County, CA. Her fiction has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize four times, and her work has appeared in more than 100 print and online literary journals, including the Los Angeles Review and Guernica. See Patty’s full bio.

Becky Thompson: A poet, professor, yoga teacher, and activist, Becky is also the author of several books, including Survivors on the Yoga Mat: Stories for Those Healing from Trauma (meditative essays) and Zero is the Whole I Fall into at Night (poetry). She contributed poetry about her experiences in Lesbos, Greece, where she had traveled for yoga purposes and found herself volunteering to help refugees. Visit her site for more on her work.