Canyon Sam

Canyon Sam is the author of Sky Train: Tibetan Women On the Edge of History (University of Washington Press, October 2009), winner of the 2010 PEN American Center’s Open Book Award. The Dalai Lama wrote the foreword for this groundbreaking book which provides the missing narrative of women in modern Tibetan history through an interweaving of memoir, oral history and travel reportage. Publishers Weekly called it, “Remarkable… visceral and deeply felt, she evokes a beautiful subtle culture that is as rich as it is foreign…”

Over nineteen years in the making, Sky Train has won praise from Robert Thurman, Maxine Hong Kingston, Sylvia Boorstein, Alice Walker, Sharon Salzburg and the American Library Association. A third generation Chinese American, Ms. Sam spent a year in Asia when Tibet first opened in the mid 1980s. Returning to the States she worked as an early Tibet activist in the U.S. — helping found the Tibetan Nuns Project, hosting a cable TV program on Tibet and speaking at the Congressional hearings on Tiananmen Square. A nationally acclaimed performance artist, her shows exploring the challenges of Buddhist practice in the West — have toured North America, including the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Asia Society in New York, colleges and universities. The Village Voice called her, “A master storyteller …whose work is universally relevant.”

Her memoirs, plays, and articles have appeared in over two dozen publications including Homelands: Women’s Journeys Across Race, Place, and Time (2007, Seal Press/Avalon), Shambhala Sun, The Seattle Review, and the San Jose Mercury News. She wrote for Agence France Presse. Ms. Sam is the recipient of numerous artists’ residencies and awards including a Screenwriting Fellowship from the Center for Asian American Media, a National Endowment for the Arts scholarship, and a San Francisco Arts Commission Individual Artist’s grant in literature.