Vajra Kilgour was born a very long time ago in Washington, DC, and grew up in an all-White neighborhood in a nearly all-White suburb of New Haven, Connecticut, which served as a fine introduction to White studies. She began to get involved in the civil-rights and antiwar movements at an early age, and after moving to New York City to attend college, got arrested during the 1968 uprising at Columbia University, and then worked with the Black Panther Party and the Peace and Freedom Party for a season. She soon began a serious search for a spiritual path, and in 1980 was initiated into what was then the Sufi Order in the West, now the Inayatiyya. In the 1990s, she began to learn shamanic practices, just as a conflict with her West Harlem landlord and, subsequently, the never-ending Pacifica radio wars pulled her back into political activism. Since then, she has been given the medio asiento initiation in Santería and discovered the joys of 12-stepping. She has traveled widely in search of holy places and cool photos, fallen in love with the entire planet, and learned that right where we are is always going to be as holy as it gets, if only we can feel it.

For perhaps too long, Kilgour worked at Newsweek, eventually as Letters Editor, in the mistaken belief that “burrowing from within” could accomplish something. Since leaving Newsweek in 1984, she has worked as a tenant organizer and as a freelance editor, writer, and translator; her work has been published in Newsweek, The New Yorker, On the Issues, and Tenant/Inquilino. Her last paying job was as a Spanish-language interpreter at a public hospital in the South Bronx. In an unpaid capacity, she is an associate producer and sometime host of Housing Notebook, on WBAI-FM, and she still lives in the city so nice they named it twice: New York, New York.