A native New Yorker, Joseph Roccasalvo followed his graduate degrees in Philosophy, English Literature, and Theology with a Harvard Ph.D. in Comparative Religion and a specialty in Buddhism. He has lived and taught in Boston, Bangkok and Chicago. For over ten years in New York City, he was a professor of religious studies at Fordham University´s Bronx and Lincoln Center Campuses. He was also visiting professor of Buddhism at Columbia University in New York City and Franklin University in Lugano, Switzerland. Now engaged in graduate school mentoring, he is also a fiction writer. He has published five novels: Fire in a Windless Place, Chartreuse, Portrait of a Woman, The Devil´s Interval, and The Odor of Sanctity. Two novellas, The Powers That Be and and Beyond the Pale appeared in print as Double Entendre. There followed three books of short stories: Outwards Signs, The Mansions of Limbo, and Triple Sec; then a play, Waging Waugh, and a memoir, As It Were. He has guided students in journalism and international studies at The New School for Social Research, and has contributed essays to the New School's newspaper in his online column, A Word to the Wise.