Bensonhurst Sutra: Tales of an Italian American Buddhist

The book is full of stories about her place in her traditional family, where her father was the intellectual, her mother the traditional housewife and her sister the older sister who never got the nurturing she needed. As the favored child with a wobbly sense of her own power, DeLuca chronicles her development as a writer and painter, her teaching life, her marital struggles, and her yearning for a spiritual life that centered itself in this world. The book moves in and out of narrative, framing stories in theoretical contexts, calling upon her understanding of Buddhism--which is avowedly a study in progress--to give context and meaning to her experience.

Her colleague and award-winning scholar Peter Taubman writes: "I can't think of anything I've read that does such a beautiful job of presenting Buddhist practice and revealing how it works in the raw, everyday reality of our lives. Each chapter is a gem. I was provoked, moved, inspired, and tickled by so many of the stories recounted in the book, the way they were framed in terms of the author's own practice. And the prose is beautiful. The word 'pellucid' kept coming to mind. . . . The writing in this brilliant work is like a totally clear glass, and the light shines through, illuminating paths through these dark days."

Geraldine DeLuca is a writer, painter, and Professor Emerita of English at Brooklyn College, CUNY. Early in her career, she and her colleague Roni Natov co-founded and co-edited The Lion and the Unicorn, a Critical Journal of Children's Literature, which is now published by Johns Hopkins UP. In 2018, she published Teaching toward Freedom: Voices and Silence in the English Classroom, Routledge Press. She has published short stories, interviews, poems, and academic essays in various places, and with Len Fox, Mark Ameen Johnson, and Myra Kogen, she edited a collection of essays titled Dialogue on Writing, Lawrence Erlbaum, 2002.

In 2007, she was awarded the Elena Cornaro Award by the New York State chapter of the Sons of Italy, an award given annually to an Italian American woman with a Ph.D. With David Forbes, she received a grant from the Association for Contemplative Mind in Higher Education to establish a program in contemplative practice at Brooklyn College. That program has become part of the larger City University of New York Program in Mindfulness and Contemplative Studies. For many years she has been a part of the Valley Insight Meditation Society in Lebanon, New Hampshire, which grounds her work, her relationships, her experience of being in the world.