Benjamin Wachs

During college Benjamin Wachs lived in a Buddhist monastery in India. After dropping out of graduate school, he worked as a freelance nightlife reporter for Playboy.com. Traveling around the world, he wrote about bars for money, toured brothels, while also meeting a wide variety of individuals including the Dalai Lama and Larry Flynt. He spontaneously sang sacred music in some of history's greatest cathedrals for fun. The police were called to stop his singing in the cathedral of King?s College Cambridge (but didn?t catch him), while the guards at the Vatican shrugged and let him continue. After he sang in the temple of Hagia Spohia in Istanbul, a museum guide told him he represents everything wrong with American culture, but he was hired to entertain pilgrims in Jerusalem. Today, Wachs is the bar columnist for SF Weekly, one of the country's leading alternative newspapers. He also serves as Saybrook University's Director of Communication, and edits its academic website The New Existentialists. He received his MA in linguistics from Purdue, and has won numerous awards for journalism. He has written for Gannett, Village Voice Media, NPR, and GateHouse Media, among other venues. He is a blogger for Burningman.com and was also the publisher of Fiction365.com. A Guide to Bars and Nightlife in the Sacred City is his first collection of fiction.