CANYON SAM # 1 Organized by TANC and the Oakland Asian Cultural Center

CANYON SAM is a writer, nationally acclaimed performance artist and activist from San Francisco. Her newly published book Sky Train: Tibetan Women On the Edge of History (University of Washington Press, 2009), with a foreword by the Dalai Lama, reveals for the first time the untold narrative of Tibet from the perspective of its women. Blending memoir and oral history, the author travels on Chinas controversial new Sky Train to Lhasa in 2007 and crosses the Himalayas in search of women from her earlier oral history project. This groundbreaking book reveals gripping stories of womens resistance, courage and spiritual resilience in fifty years of occupation and gives one of the first inside accounts of the recent and drastic changes in Tibet from the perspective of the Tibetan people. Remarkablevisceral and deeply felt. Publishers Weekly starred review. A miracle of a journey, a miracle of a book. Maxine Hong Kingston. Chinese American, San Francisco native, Canyon Sam spent a year in Tibet and Dharamsala when Tibet first opened in the mid 1980s. Consequently she became a Tibet activist in the U.S., helping found the Tibetan Nuns Project, doing grassroots organizing and speaking before Congress for their Tiananmen Square hearings to link human rights in Tibet to that event. Sky Train, begun as an oral history project, was over nineteen years in the making. www.canyonsam.com

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