Colleen Morton Busch is the author of Fire Monks: Zen Mind Meets Wildfire, a work of nonfiction published by Penguin Press and selected by Publisher’s Weekly, San Francisco Chronicle, and Barnes and Noble as a best book of the year in 2011. Her poetry collection, Smolder, won the Richard-Gabriel Rummonds Poetry Contest and is forthcoming from Ex Ophidia Press in summer 2026.
Her work spans genres and has appeared in a variety of publications, from Orion, Tricycle, Lion’s Roar, Wild Hope and Yoga Journal, where she was a senior editor, to HuffPost and Washington Post, and numerous literary magazines, including Poet Lore, Willow Springs, Manoa, and The Ekphrastic Review, among others.
She grew up in the Midwest but has lived in the San Francisco Bay Area for many years.