Leza Lowitz is an internationally renowned yoga instructor and an award-winning author of over twenty books in multiple genres, including the groundbreaking Yoga Poems: Lines to Unfold By (Winner of the PEN/Josephine Miles Poetry Award) and Yoga Heart: Lines on the Six Perfections. Her most recent book is a YA novel in verse, Up from the Sea (Penguin/Random House). She has taught writing at San Francisco State University and the University of Tokyo, and has been an invited speaker at literary and yoga festivals in the U.S., Japan, Bali, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, and the UAE. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Huffington Post, Shambhala Sun, Best Buddhist Writing, Art in America, and more. She lived in Japan for over 20 years, where she ran a yoga studio and taught thousands of students, including Fortune 500 company executives and Hollywood A-Listers like Morgan Freeman and Kenneth Branagh. She is also a certified Mindfulness Meditation Teacher through the Awareness Training Institute and the Greater Good Science Center at the University of California at Berkeley.