Institute for Thealogy & Deasophy

Starhawk

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 eleven 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, the now-classic ecotopian novel The Fifth Sacred Thing, and The Earth Path: Grounding Your Spirit in the Rhythms of Nature. Her newest book is a picture book for children, The Last Wild Witch.

Her works have been translated into Spanish, French, German, Danish, Dutch, Italian, Portuguese, Polish, Greek, Japanese, and Burmese. 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. 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. 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. Webs of Power won a 2003 Nautilus Award and The Last Wild Witch won a silver Nautilus in 2010.

Starhawk received an M.A. In psychology with a concentration in feminist therapy from Antioch University West in 1982. She has taught in several Bay Area Colleges and Universities, including John F. Kennedy University, Antioch West, the Institute of Culture and Creation Spirituality at Holy Names College, and Wisdom University. She is presently adjunct faculty at the California Instituted of Integral Studies.

Starhawk is the founder of Earth Activist Training, a program that offers permaculture design courses with a grounding in earth based spirituality and a focus on activism and organizing. She earned her permaculture design certificate in 1996 and has been teaching design courses since 2001.

Starhawk is perhaps best known as an articulate pioneer in the revival of earth-based spirituality and Goddess religion. 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 is a panelist for On Faith, a religion website sponsored by Newsweek and the Washington Post. Her archives are maintained at the Graduate Theological Union library in Berkeley, California.

She consulted on and contributed to the popular trio of films known as the Women's Spirituality series, directed by Donna Read for the National Film Board of Canada: Goddess Remembered, The Burning Times, and Full Circle. Starhawk and Donna Read formed their own film company, Belili Productions (www.belili.org). Their first release is Signs Out of Time (2004), a documentary on the life of archaeologist Marija Gimbutas, the scholar made major discoveries about the Goddess cultures of Old Europe. Starhawk and Donna's next documentary, Permaculture: The Growing Edge will be released in the fall of 2010.

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.

Starhawk travels internationally teaching permaculture, 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. Her blog, Dirt Worship, can be found at http://starhawksblog.org.
Other links are Earth Activist Training www.earthactivisttraining.org and Belili Productions www.belili.org.

Publications

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, Italian, Spanish, and Greek editions.
Dreaming the Dark: Magic, Sex, and Politics. Boston, Beacon, 1982, 1988, 1997 editions. French and German editions.
Truth or Dare: Encounters with Power, Authority, and Mystery. San Francisco, HarperSanFrancisco.,1988. German edition.
The Fifth Sacred Thing. New York, Bantam, 1993. German, Italian, Polish, and Portuguese editions.
Walking to Mercury. New York, Bantam, 1997.
The Pagan Book of Living and Dying, co-written with M. Macha NightMare and the Reclaiming Collective. San Francisco, HarperSanFrancisco, 1997.
Circle Round: Raising Children in the Goddess Tradition. Co-written 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, co-written with Hilary Valentine. San Francisco, HarperSanFrancisco, 2000. Dutch, Spanish, and German editions.
Webs of Power: Notes from the Global Uprising. Victoria, Canada; New Society Publishers, 2002. Essays translated into Burmese, French, and Italian.
The Earth Path: Grounding Your Spirit in the Rhythms of Nature. San Francisco, HarperSanFrancisco, 2004
The Last Wild Witch. Wolf Creek, Oregon, Mother Tongue Ink, 2010