After ten years of working as a college theatre professor, Karuna Das walked away from academia to pursue his dramatic writing full-time. When multiple readers told him his screenplays were novelesque, he decided to try his hand at the more expansive, detailed canvas of that form. He adapted two of his scripts as book-length works and started shopping them to agents and small presses. In the meantime, pieces of short fiction he penned during the COVID lockdown found their way into literary magazines. Sure enough, his novel Kat’s Cradle: Webolution Book One was soon accepted for publication and won an award, with his “fictionalized memoir” Sex, Drugs & Spiritual Enlightenment (but mostly the first two) being released the following year and picking up a pair of awards. It seems he was meant to be a fiction writer.

 

In between the publications of his novels, Karuna almost died. Again. This time his aorta and other major arteries tore apart inside. He beat the odds that day (or at least his surgeon did). This close encounter with his mortality left him even more grateful for the gift of consciousness. It renewed – and doubled – his sense of purpose. In addition to telling stories that express the inexpressible, that point toward the ineffable truth of existence – reality without the false filters of separation – he felt a heightened calling toward embodied connection with others, helping bring them into pure presence through touch. He developed a component of his spiritual practice, performing tantric erotic massage as a gift, into a career in paid sex work. He now strives to balance the demands of these dual professions, each of which he views as a sacred calling.

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Born in Wisconsin, Karuna grew up in Massachusetts and presently resides in Pennsylvania, but he lives wherever he happens to be at that moment and feels at home everywhere in the universe. He sees himself as a verb, not a noun, a constantly evolving, dynamic process. He plays a range of shifting roles that feel authentic in each moment as he strives to maintain radical intimacy with life.

 

He identifies as antifascist, antiracist, feminist, queer, kinky, and polyamorous. His stories reflect that.

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Works-in-progress include Solar Max: Webolution Book Two, a fictionalized version of the lives and deaths of his maternal grandparents and mother called Playing by Ear, and the spiritual-political thriller Bodie's Sattva. In addition to fiction and drama, he's published creative nonfiction, poetry, and essays.