City Arts & Lectures presents
The Buddhist on Death Row
with David Sheff & Jarvis Jay Masters
in conversation with Rebecca Solnit
benefiting The GRIP Training Institute
Webcast from San Francisco

In The Buddhist on Death Row, David Sheff explores the transformation of Jarvis Jay Masters, a renowned Buddhist thinker and inmate on death row at San Quentin State Prison. With uncanny clarity, Sheff describes Masters’s gradual transformation from a man consumed by violence to one who has helped those around him find meaning and peace in their lives.

Journalist David Sheff is the author of Beautiful Boy: A Father’s Journey Through His Son’s Addiction and the follow-up Clean: Overcoming Addiction and Ending America’s Greatest Tragedy. His other books include Game Over, about the videogame industry, China Down, about China’s internet revolution, and now The Buddhist on Death Row: How One Man Found Light in the Darkest Place.

Jarvis Jay Masters is an inmate on death row at San Quentin prison after being convicted of conspiracy in the murder of a prison guard in 1990. The author of That Bird Has My Wings: The Autobiography of an Innocent Man on Death Row as well as numerous articles, he won a PEN Award in 1992 for his poem "Recipe for Prison Pruno." There is a large-scale campaign to advocate his innocence and work within the legal system to free him.

Rebecca Solnit is an incisive voice on topics ranging from feminism to the environment, western history to literary criticism, and from hope and disaster to popular power and social change. She has published more than twenty books, including three collections of essays – Hope in the Dark, Men Explain Things to Me, and The Mother of All Questions – as well as a trilogy of atlases of American cities, a work of literary criticism on Eadweard Muybridge, and a new memoir Recollections of My Nonexistence.

The GRIP Program (formerly Insight-Out) transforms violence and suffering into learning and healing. Its year-long program guides life-sentenced, violent offenders, through a deeply transformative journey, wherein they effectively “leave prison before they get out.” GRIP recognizes freedom as a state of mind/heart not just a geographical fact, such as being on the other side of the prison gate. In the last 8 years 273 graduates of the GRIP program were released from prison by the Parole Board; only 1 came back to prison. For more information, visit https://insight-out.org

To purchase Masters', Sheff's or Solnit's books, visit Books, Inc. at https://www.booksinc.net. They are offering FREE SHIPPING (and you'll be supporting an independent bookstore).

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