Summer Dance of the Fireflies

Ed Connolly is a Dean of Student Services at the Chancellor's Office of the California Community Colleges where he administers statewide community college programs for educationally and economically disadvantages students. Ed graduated from UC Santa Cruz in 1974 where he created his own major in Marxist Studies and in 1988 received a master's degree in counseling psychology. Ed grew up in Brooklyn, New York and it was in a vacant lot that, at the age of five, he first encountered fireflies. Ed tells of how he and his friends waited each summer with great excitement and anticipation for the first night they arrived. And how all of the children would come out with their parents to run through the field, old mayonnaise jars in hand, filled with grass, catching the fireflies, putting them in the jar, and being in a state of awe and wonder at the light they created. Summer Dance of the Fireflies was created from this childhood experience in Brooklyn and his longstanding interest and study of oral traditions and cultures, epistemology, and spirituality. Ed lives in Sacramento, California with Karen Dotson his wife of 25 years and they have two grown children.