Geraldine DeLuca is a writer, painter, and English professor who taught at Brooklyn College, CUNY, for many years. Halfway through her career, she found herself drawn to the ways that contemplative practices could take the edge off the tension in her classroom. Led by other teachers and writers who espoused "radical self acceptance" as a way of approaching whatever came next, she sought a method of putting down the burden of the endlessly critical self and looking for a spiritual tradition that supported her experiences. Her book Bensonhurst Sutra grounds the stories of her life in the search for a more peaceful way of being. A previous book, Teaching Toward Freedom: Voices and Silence in the English Classroom (Routledge, 2018), is specifically about voices in contemporary literature, contemplative practice in the classroom, and fruitful ways of looking at the problem of plagiarism in student writing.
