Peter Schireson began writing after a long career, first in education, then in business. He holds a Doctorate in Education from Harvard University and an MFA from the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. He is also an ordained Zen Buddhist priest and dharma lineage holder, having trained in both the U.S. and Japan. He lives in Palm Springs, CA with his wife Grace, with whom he co-edited Zen Bridge: The Zen Teachings of Keido Fukushima.

He is the author of the poetry collections The Salt, What Worlds and Moons, The Welter of Me & You, Sword of Glass, and How We Met. His sixth collection, Before the Sun, is forthcoming in Spring 2023 from Kelsay Books.

Peter Schireson’s beautiful poems—full of wit, loyal to the potential for late-life erotics, drawn to stare the most terrible facts in the face—startle the reader into the awakeness, and even hilarity, that results when  an essential strangeness is revealed inside the supposedly ordinary.

~Patrick Donnelly