.jpg)
Solomon Black is a writer, visual artist and musician who has lived and traveled all over the world. Except Australia. And Antarctica. He holds special affection for Kumily, Cochin, Varkala (Kerala), and Tiruvannamalai (Tamil Nadu), in India; Valparaiso, Chile; Penang, Malaysia; Kyoto, Japan; Ko Tao, Nahm Tok (Kanchanaburi), Pathom Asoke, Krung Thep, and Wat Suan Mokh, Thailand; Essouira and the High Atlas Mountains, Morocco; Harbledown and Chilham (Kent), England, and Traquair (Borders), Scotland; Barcelona; Sardinia; Jerusalem; and the rivers, mountains, coasts, valleys, and from time to time villages and cities of Northern California and Oregon. Occasionally New York and New Orleans.
He has beheaded salmon in Valdez, Alaska, and lived as a renunciate hermit (though not as a poisoner) in a canyon in the mountains of Southern Oregon, where his novel Notes from the Last Place is set; as a farmer in the Willamette Valley; as a monk in Central and Southern Thailand; as a library audio archivist at a university in Boulder, Colorado that was founded by a Tibetan Buddhist Rinpoche and a bunch of wacko poets; and as a brewer of strong ales and long tales. When everything falls into place, he sits in on accordion with a band called Fermentation Grenade that haunts the roadhouses of the North Coast. He has been known to inhabit a hundred-year-old barn at a one-time potato farm on Navarro Ridge, where he lives with his coyote-heeler dog Dukkha and a couple of affectionate humans, and has been slowly recording ecstatic extravagant travesties of sound under the moniker Yidwestern, while also working on a graphic-novel sequel to The Boy Who Cried Wolf's Art of Sight; a text (i.e. non-illustrated) novel loosely inspired by poet Lew Welch; and at least one stirring and heartbreaking young adult action-adventure set in an alternate South/Southeast Asia.