General Information: Overview: Who We Are: Susan Efird

Susan Efird has been a Zen student for almost ten years, studying with Roshi Janet Jinne Richardson, CSJP, and Senseis Rosalie Jishin McQuaide, CSJP, Bruce Seiryu Blackman, and Rose Mary Myoan Dougherty, SSND. She served as board secretary for the Zen Community of Baltimore/Clare Sangha. She is a member of One Heart Sangha in Silver Spring, Maryland.

She is a senior editor at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., and has worked there for eight years. She was the editor in chief for Frontier, the quarterly news magazine from Share Our Strength, an anti-hunger and anti-poverty organization. In Denver, she was editor for the photovoltaics research branch of the Solar Energy Research Institute (now NREL).Ê Earlier in her career she worked for The New Yorker magazine under William Shawn.

She was awarded a fellowship from the Rocky Mountain Women's Institute to work on a poetic novel; later she served on the RMWI board. She is the author of several book-length poems (one about a conference of the birds based on Attar's poem and another, a meditation on the human face, set in New York City), as well as short poems and sonnets. She is writing (and illustrating) a novel about the spiritual life of a woman dying from Alzheimer's. She was a hospice volunteer in Denver and Washington for thirteen years. She is interested in issues of death and dying as well as in the arts, especially poetry, as a vehicle to reveal the essential.