Marisa Handler

Marisa earned her Masters in Fine Arts in Fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She was the recipient of a 2010 Fulbright grant to India in Creative Writing, and a 2014 Elizabeth George Foundation novel-writing grant. Her poem “The Vanishing” won the 2017 Lois Cranston Memorial Poetry Prize. She has received residency fellowships from the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, the Santa Fe Art Institute, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Mesa Refuge, the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, and the Valparaiso Foundation (Spain). Marisa teaches fiction and nonfiction at the graduate and undergraduate levels at Mills College in Oakland. She also teaches at Stanford (The Writers’ Studio) and leads workshops at Spirit Rock Meditation Center, the Esalen Institute, and the California Institute for Integral Studies.

A recording singer-songwriter, Marisa has performed at venues ranging from San Francisco’s Herbst Memorial Theater to La Paz’s Thelonious Jazz Bar, Jerusalem’s Mike’s Place, Cape Town’s Dizzy Jazz Café, some divey club in Havana whose name she’s forgotten, and Oakland’s Ecstatic Dance. Her latest songs are available on Soundcloud.

As a freelance journalist, Marisa has written on a wide range of social and environmental issues, including the joys and trials of change in Cuba, indigenous resistance to oil exploitation in the Amazon, Hindu-Muslim tensions in India, and the sprawling tentacles of consumer culture. An activist and firm believer in the power of principled nonviolence, Marisa has worked as an organizer in grassroots justice movements, and spoken and sung about transformative change across the country and on numerous radio shows.

A serious practitioner of insight meditation for seventeen years, having sat over thirty silent retreats ranging from a week to a month in length, Marisa often integrates mindfulness and its principles into her teaching and coaching. She is also in the certification program for The Work, an inquiry method developed by Byron Katie, and is a practitioner of Authentic Movement and Biodanza. Marisa has taught writing as a tool for healing chronic and mental illness, and is very interested in the intersections between creative process and personal and collective transformation. What else? Dance, bien sur! Any time, any place (well, almost). And nature—ditto. Hiking, backpacking, simply being in and of it.

Born in Cape Town, South Africa, Marisa now makes her home in Berkeley, California. She is currently at work on a novel.