photo: © Dorothy Alexander

Andrew Schelling

Andrew Schelling, born January 14, 1953 in Washington D.C., grew up in New England's Transcendentalist country. He moved west to Northern California in 1973. There he explored wilderness regions of the Coast Range and Sierra Nevadas and studied Sanskrit and Asian literature at U.C. Berkeley. An ecologist, naturalist, and explorer of wilderness areas, he has travelled extensively in North America, Europe, India, and the Himalayas. In 1990 he relocated to Colorado to join the faculty at Naropa University where he teaches poetry, Sanskrit, and wilderness writing. Poet, amateur naturalist, mountaineer, and translator of India's classical poetry, he lives in Boulder, along the front range of the Southern Rocky Mountains.

In 1992, Schelling received the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets for Dropping the Bow: Poems of Ancient India (1991). His volumes of translation also include For Love of the Dark One: Songs of Mirabai (1993, revised edition 1998) and The Cane Groves of Narmada River: Erotic Poems of Old India (City Light Books, 1998). His collections of essays and poems include Wild Form, Savage Grammar: Poetry, Ecology, Asia (2003), Tea Shack Interior: New & Selected Poetry (2001), The Road to Ocosingo (1998), Old Growth: Poems and Notebooks 1986-1994 (1995), The India Book: Essays & Translations from Indian Asia (1993), and Moon Is a Piece of Tea (1993). Schelling has also received two grants for translation from the Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry.