Enlightened Beings

Jan Willis is Professor Emerita of Religion at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. Born in Docena, Alabama, in 1948 and profoundly affected by the Civil Rights movement, she majored in philosophy at Cornell University and met Buddhism while traveling in Asia in the 1970s. She went on to earn her PhD in Buddhist Studies at Columbia University and has studied with Tibetan Buddhists in India, Nepal, Switzerland, and the U.S. for over four decades. The author of several books and numerous articles and essays on Buddhist philosophy and history, meditation, women and Buddhism and Buddhism and race, her memoir Dreaming Me: Black, Baptist, and Buddhist was first published in 2001. In December of 2000, Time named Willis one of six spiritual innovators for the new millennium. In 2003, she was a recipient of Wesleyan University´s Binswanger Prize for Excellence in Teaching. In September of 2005, Newsweek´s Spirituality in America issue included a profile of her and, in its May 2007 edition, Ebony magazine named Willis one of its Power 150 most influential African Americans.