Book Talk: Traveling in Bardo: The Art of Living in an Impermanent World

Speaker: Ann Tashi Slater, author

Moderator: Lauran Hartley, Director, Modern Tibetan Studies Program, WEAI, Columbia University; Adjunct Assistant Professor, EALAC

Ann Tashi Slater contributes to The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Paris Review, Tin House, Guernica, AGNI, Granta, and many others. Her work has been featured in Lit Hub and included in The Best American Essays. In her Darjeeling Journal column for Catapult, she explores her Tibetan family history and bardo, and she blogged for HuffPost about similar topics. She presents and teaches workshops at Princeton, Columbia, Oxford, Asia Society, and the American University of Paris, among others, and was a regular speaker at NYC’s Rubin Museum of Art during the museum’s 20-year run. Her great-grandfather was a close friend of the Thirteenth Dalai Lama and helped bring The Tibetan Book of the Dead (a guide to navigating bardo between-states) to the West.

Slater will speak about her new book, Traveling in Bardo: The Art of Living in an Impermanent World, which will be released by the Balance imprint of the Hachette Book Group on Sept. 9, 2025.

During over 40 years of writing and speaking about her Tibetan-American heritage and the relevance of Buddhism in Western society, Slater has come to see how Tibetan bardo views on impermanence can transform the way we live. In Tibetan belief, bardo is the interval between death and rebirth, as well as the intermediate state between birth and death. It also refers to liminal periods in life when the reality we know comes to an end. A time of great possibility, it offers us the opportunity to find happiness in an impermanent world.

Interweaving explorations of bardo in relation to marriage and friendship, parents and children, work and creativity with stories of her Tibetan ancestors and the Buddhist teachings on the fleeting nature of existence, Ann Tashi Slater illuminates what the teachings have to tell us in our contemporary lives. She relays vital wisdom from Tibetan culture, giving us a bold, new framework to navigate moments of change and live life fully.

This event is hosted by the Modern Tibetan Studies Program at the Weatherhead East Asian Institute.

Registration:

• To attend this event in-person, please register HERE.
• To attend this event online, please register HERE.

Click here to pre-order your copy of the book. Books will also be available for purchase on the day of the event.

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