Colleen Morton Busch is the author of Fire Monks: Zen Mind Meets Wildfire, a work of nonfiction published by Penguin Press and selected by Publishers Weekly, San Francisco Chronicle, and Barnes and Noble as a best book of the year in 2011. Her poetry collection, Smolder, won the 2025 Richard-Gabriel Rummonds Poetry Contest and was published by Ex Ophidia Press.
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 the Washington Post, and numerous literary magazines, including Poet Lore, Willow Springs, New Orleans Review, MĀNOA, The Bellevue Literary Review, and elsewhere.
She grew up in the Midwest but has lived in the San Francisco Bay Area for many years.
She’s a lay-ordained Zen practitioner and currently serves as board president at Berkeley Zen Center.