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AUTHOR’S BIOGRAPHY Joy Parker has spent nearly twenty years learning about the lifeways, healing, and spiritual practices of traditional cultures. She is the co-author (along with Linda Schele and David Freidel) of two groundbreaking books on the history of the Maya Indians, A Forest of Kings: The Untold Story of the Ancient Maya and Maya Cosmos: Three Thousand Years on the Shaman’s Path. More recently, she co-authored Woman Who Glows in the Dark. This was the first book ever written about curanderismo, a five-hundred-year-old traditional medical system with roots in Spanish, Native American, and African healing traditions. Joy has trained with many healers and medicine people, including West African medicine man Malidoma Somé, whom she has known for fourteen years. With Malidoma, she completed “Into the Heart of Healing,” a nine-month intensive on African spirit medicine, talismanic protection, and ritual and “Spirit Dreaming,” an advanced one-year intensive with Malidoma, psychotherapist Francis Weller, storyteller and mythologist Reda Rackley, and bodyworker Rowena Panteleon. This training was designed to explore our relationship to the Dreamtime, the ancestors, and the soul. Joy has traveled throughout Honduras, Guatemala, and Mexico talking with indigenous people about their lifeways. Currently, she is studying her own indigenous Irish roots and planning a pilgrimage to sacred sites in Ireland. As a trained performer in vocal music, acting, and dance, Joy brings a special quality and dramatic flare to her teaching, lectures, and workshops. She studied at the famous Herbert Berghof Acting Studio in New York City with such well-known teachers as William Hickey, Loyd Williamson, and Herbert Berghof himself, and has worked extensively with musicians and choreographers in New York City and in California. She is at ease in front of audiences of all kinds and believes that her purpose is not only to teach, inspire, and empower, but to entertain. Joy has facilitated dozens of workshops/rituals for healing, storytelling, soul retrieval, and the healthy release of grief, based on her experiences with indigenous cultures. She is a popular speaker on the rituals and life-ways of the Mayan Indians at such venues as the Bowers Museum and the Museum of Latin American Art (CA), and she has done lectures, workshops, and readings at Columbia University (NY), New York University, the Mid-Manhattan Library (NY), the Dia Foundation (NY), Dixon Place (NY), Chrysalis House (CA), Inside Edge (CA), and the University of Texas at Austin. She is also the founder of the Jaguar-Hummingbirds, a women’s group dedicated to self-actualization and empowerment through ritual and art. From 1991 to 1992, Joy was head of public relations at Parabola: The Magazine of Myth and Tradition. There she helped to develop several major projects that explored indigenous culture during the Columbus Quincentennial Year. These included Handprints, a five-part video series exploring ceremony and ritual conducted by elders of five indigenous cultures and The Storytime Series, a series of audio tapes recorded by traditional Native American Storytellers. She also co-created an evening of Native American Storytelling at the New York Museum of Natural History, featuring Joseph Bruchac and Linda Hogan. Joy has been a guest on Future Watch, a television series broadcast nationwide and in 150 countries and in the PBS special The New Earthkeepers, where she was interviewed about the ancient Maya Indians and their environmental practices. She taught creative writing and journalism at both New York University and Columbia University, and was a recipient of a New York State Council on the Arts Grant. She currently teaches in the Writing Program at the University of California at Irvine.