Ayahuasca Reader Encounters with the Amazon's Sacred Vine

Luis Eduardo Luna, born in Florenciain 1947, in the Colombian Amazon region, is co-editor with Steven F. White of the Ayahuasca Reader. He received his PhD from the Institute of Comparative Religion at Stockholm University. A Guggenheim Fellow and Fellow of the Linnean Society of London, he is also the author of Vegetalismo: Shamanism among the Mestizo Population of the Peruvian Amazon and, with Pablo Amaringo, Ayahuasca Visions: The Religious Iconography of a Peruvian Shaman, a project that grew from their work to establish the internationally recognized USKO-AYAR Amazonian School of Painting in Pucallpa, Peru. From 1994 to 1998 he was a Professor in Anthropology at the Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina in Florianópolis, Brazil. He retired from the Swedish School of Economics in Helsinki in 2011. He is the Director of Wasiwaska, Research Center for the Study of Psychointegrator Plants, Visionary Art and Consciousness, based in Florianópolis, southern Brazil.

Steven F. White, born in Abington, Pennsylvania in 1955, is co-editor with Luis Eduardo Luna of the Ayahuasca Reader. He received a BA in English from Williams College as well as MA and PhD degrees in Spanish from the University of Oregon. He received support from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Lannan Foundation and was the recipient of two Fulbright fellowships. He has lived and worked in many Latin American countries, an opportunity that enabled him to edit bilingual anthologies of poetry from Nicaragua, Chile and Brazil. Recent books have focused on ecology and include El mundo más que humano en la poesía de Pablo Antonio Cuadra: un estudio ecocrítico, Arando el aire: la ecología en la poesía y la música de Nicaragua and El consumo de lo que somos: muestra de poesía ecológica hispánica contemporánea. He also co-translated Federico García Lorca’s Poet in New York and The Angel of Rain by Gastón Baquero. His published poetry includes Escanciador de pócimas, Bajo la palabra de las plantas (poesía selecta: 1979-2009) and Sworn to the Plants: Selected Poems (1976-2016). He has been teaching at St. Lawrence University since 1987 and is one of the co-founders of its Caribbean and Latin American Studies program.