John Brandi has been an active walker, writer and visual artist since boyhood rambles in the Sierra Nevada. After graduating from California State University, Northridge, he joined the Peace Corps and worked with Andean serfs who were uniting to regain their land rights. His many books of poetry, prose, haiku, and haibun have earned him a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, poetry-in-the- schools residencies in Yupik, Navajo, and Pueblo communities, a White Pine Press World of Voices Poetry Award, six Witter Bynner Foundation teaching grants, and a Touchstone Distinguished Books Award for A House By Itself: Selected Haiku of Masaoka Shiki. In 1979 he traveled to India to retrace his father's WW II journey as an army private in the India-Burma Theater. It was the first of many visits that led to the Himalayas of Nepal, Ladakh and Sikkim. He recently authored The Great Unrest (White Pine Press), a collection of poems, and Planet Pilgrim (Palace Press), his paean to Japanese poet, Nanao Sakaki.