As the country’s leading multi-media celebrity pet lifestyle expert and influencer, SANDY ROBINS documents the wonderful relationship that we have with our pets highlighting trends and innovative ideas as they happen. Many dogs and cats have lifestyles that mirror their pet parents’ own lives. Nothing is too good for our fur kids. Consequently, the pet industry is a 58 billion dollar business – bigger than toys, candy and jewelry combined. Sandy documents this industry every step of the way highlighting how these trends can improve our pet’s general health and well being and enhance our human-animal bond. She is the winner of the Excellence in Journalism and Outstanding Contribution to the Pet Industry Award presented by the American Pet Products Association. Previous winners include Dr. Marty Becker, Ellen De Generes and Victoria Stilwell. Her award-winning work is very visible on many of the country’s leading pet platforms such as Today.com, MSNBC.com and PawNation, AOL’s petcentric website. She is a regular contributor and columnist in multiple national publications such as Modern Dog, Dog Fancy and Cat Fancy as well as industry leaders such as Pet Age magazine and mainstream media such as Consumers Digest. Her work also appears regularly on a variety of prestigious blogs. Every feature or TV appearance breaks new ground as Sandy details everything from state-of-the-art surgical procedures to improve our pets’ wellbeing to the latest haute couture designs and the new home décor trends as they unfold. Her books include the award-winning Fabulous Felines: Health and Beauty Secrets for the Pampered Cat and For The Love of Cats. Her latest book, The Original Cat Bible is out now. Sandy is a popular guest speaker and works as a TV lifestyle spokesperson for PETCO. She served as a pet safety advisor for TOYOTA and is aligned with many prestigious companies in the pet industry. She is often quoted in mainstream publications such as Martha Stewart’s Living, The Wall Street Journal, Kiplinger’s and websites such as Fox News and Oprah.com. She is featured as a guest lecturer at Cat College, the popular online study course offered at CatChannel.com, is a popular radio guest on stations around the country. She has worked in radio hosting her own show Pawsitively Pets Radio, as well as a segment called House Pets on the On The House network which reached a weekly audience of 1.2 million. If there’s a major event in the pet world, you can count on Sandy being there. She is a regular visitor at all major pet industry expos and a regular attendee at conferences such as the annual Cat Writer’s Conference. She is along-standing member of both the Cat Writers of America and the prestigious Dog Writers of America organizations. Sandy is an avid campaigner for animal shelters and laws that protect animals everywhere. She is a strong advocator of pet adoption. Every pet deserves a loving permanent home and she has been among the first to point out that shelter pets do benefit from the luxurious lifestyles that other pets are lucky enough to enjoy because over-indulgent pet parents are often the first to give donations and organize fund-raising events to help animals that have been abandoned and neglected. Because she often travels internationally, Sandy knows what it hot and happening in other parts of the world too. Of course it goes without saying that she is a besotted pet parent to a menagerie of fur kids at her home in Southern California. The human-animal bond has never been stronger and the benefits of living with pets have never been more evident. Pets Rule!

SusieHayes, MA, CCHT, CST, CNLP

Psychotherapist, Certified Hypnotist, Certified Sex Therapist

Certified Life and Business Coach, Speaker, Author

With over 30 years in private practice in Denver, Colorado, Susie Hayes is committed to helping people access internal resources they never knew they had, to create what they never knew they could - through psychotherapy, hypnosis, sex therapy, business and life coaching.

CONTACT INFORMATION: 303.745.1816

My favorite saying is, 'Find Your Bliss!' That's what I've been doing as I write my Ocean Depths series. It's fun, like reading one of my favorite novels as it unfolds before me. I want to entertain my intended audience and take them out of their world into the fantasy fiction one I've created. How did the Ocean Depths Series start? I dreamed of Triton. It made me want to do a water color of him and the series began! The Ocean Depths series will continue into five to seven books, and I feel very privileged to write it! All of my art in Ocean Depths A Darkness was from life drawing models - real people and they inspired my story.  The plot in Ocean Depths is dramatic, humorous, conflicted, joyful and adventurous, and my endings are always cliff hangers! How fun! My hope for humanity is that we can find our bliss and be good to one another and our planet along the way no matter what belief systems we adhere too or what governments we live under. Is that simplistic? Yes, but often times the simpler an idea is, the easier it is to implement. Another great saying of mine is, 'What one man can do, so can another.' - the movie, The Edge. Why not? Each of us is our greatest asset. Turn off the TV, set aside the phone and invest in yourself. Take the time to learn and become, the rewards are incredible! As human beings, let's start out on our chosen journey, work hard at it, and along the way we will find our bliss!

Anne’s life philosophies were strongly shaped by her experience as the daughter of Alan Watts, well-known pioneer interpreter of Eastern religion and philosophy for the Western world.  At the age of 20 (in 1962) she married successful harpist Joel Andrews. Anne and Joel gave birth to two bright, musically gifted children whom they raised together until their divorce in 1972.  For the next ten years Anne was a working single parent.

Her experiences, along with her ability to empathize with people in a way that transcends social and cultural boundaries, combine in Anne to create a richly loving and compassionate person.

Anne began her formal interest in human potential in 1964 when she first studied with Virginia Satir, founder of Conjoint Family Therapy.  Her career and studies include a BA in Humanities, teaching and interpreting for the deaf and teaching Special Education in public schools.

In 1983, Anne participated in workshops offered by the Human Awareness Institute, founded by Dr. Stan Dale.  There she experienced transformation on a deep and practical level in all areas of participants’ lives; they opened their hearts to themselves and others through the magical healing power of love.  She soon realized that she had found the vehicle to manifest her life commitment, and trained to be a workshop facilitator.

She became a Certified Hypnotherapist and an educator, facilitator and counselor in the areas of Human Sexuality, sexual abuse, family stress, self-esteem, healing the “inner child,” financial and aging issues.  Since 1985, she has facilitated hundreds of workshops in the US, Australia, Japan, England and Germany.

Anne has been enthusiastically received as a guest on radio and TV, and featured in newspapers.  She is a warm and engaging speaker.  She has a successful counseling practice in Santa Rosa, California where she lives in a deeply loving relationship with her husband, Mark Kupke, who has been her partner since 1984.

About Alan Watts

Early Years

Alan Watts was born in London in 1915, at the start of the first World War. At a young age he became fascinated with the Far East, and at fourteen he began to write and was published in the Journal of the London Buddhist Lodge before writing his first booklet on Zen in 1932. He moved to New York in 1938 and then to Chicago, where he served as an Episcopal priest for six years before leaving the Church. In 1950, he moved to upstate New York before going on to San Francisco to teach at the Academy of Asian Studies. Among Alan Watts' earliest influences were the novelist Sax Rohmer and Zen scholars D.T. Suzuki and Christmas Humpreys. In late 1950, he visited with Joseph Campbell and composer John Cage in NYC.

Worldview

Alan Watts was profoundly influenced by the East Indian philosophies of Vedanta and Buddhism, and by Taoist thought, which is reflected in Zen poetry and the arts of China and Japan. After leaving the Church, he never became a member of another organized religion, and although he wrote and spoke extensively about Zen Buddhism, he was criticized by American Buddhist practicioners for not sitting regularly in zazen. Alan Watts responded simply by saying, "A cat sits until it is done sitting, and then gets up, stretches, and walks away."

1950's and early '60's

After teaching at the Academy of Asian Studies in San Francisco, he became Dean and began to give regular radio talks on KPFA, the Berkeley free radio station. In 1957, he published his bestselling Way of Zen, and in 1958 returned to Europe where he met with C.G. Jung. He was an early subject in pioneering psychedelic trials, and, after recording two seasons of the public television series Eastern Wisdom and Modern Life, traveled to Japan several times in the early sixties. By the late sixties, he had become a counterculture celebrity, and traveled widely to speak at universities and growth centers across the US and Europe.

Later Years

By the early seventies, Alan Watts had become a foremost interpreter of Eastern thought for the West, and was widely published in periodicals including Earth, Elle, Playboy, and Redbook. He appeared on CBS television's Camera Three in 1969, and in 1971 he recorded a pilot for a new show titled A Conversation with Myself for NET, the precursor to PBS. When the series was not produced, he recorded the shows with his son Mark and his long-time audio archivist Henry Jacobs in 1972. Overall, Alan Watts developed an extensive audio library of nearly 400 talks and wrote more than 25 books during his lifetime, including his final volume, Tao: The Watercourse Way. Alan Watts died in his sleep in November of 1973, after returning from an intensive international lecture tour.

John Shelby Spong, whose books have sold more than a million copies, was bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Newark for 24 years before his retirement in 2001. His admirers acclaim him as a teaching bishop who makes contemporary theology accessible to the ordinary layperson — he’s considered the champion of an inclusive faith by many, both inside and outside the Christian church. In one of his recent books,The Sins of Scripture: Exposing the Bible’s Texts of Hate to Discover the God of Love(San Francisco: HarperOne, 2005), this visionary thinker seeks to introduce readers to a proper way to engage the holy book of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

A committed Christian who has spent a lifetime studying the Bible and whose life has been deeply shaped by it, Bishop Spong says he was not interested in Bible bashing. “I come to this interpretive task not as an enemy of Christianity,” he says. “I am not even a disillusioned former Christian, as some of my scholar-friends identify themselves. I am a believer who knows and loves the Bible deeply. But I also recognize that parts of it have been used to undergird prejudices and to mask violence.”

A visiting lecturer at Harvard and at universities and churches worldwide, Bishop Spong delivers more than 200 public lectures each year to standing-room-only crowds. His bestselling books include Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism, A New Christianity for a New World, Why Christianity Must Change or Die, and Here I Stand.

Bishop Spong’s extensive media appearances include a profile segment on 60 Minutesas well as appearances on Good Morning America, Fox News Live, Politically Incorrect, Larry King Live, The O’Reilly Factor, William F. Buckley’s Firing Line, and Extra. Bishop Spong and his wife, Christine Mary Spong, have five children and six grandchildren. They live in New Jersey.

Biblical Literalism: A Gentile Heresy: A Journey into a New Christianity Through the Doorway of Matthew's Gospel by Bishop John Shelby Spong

A global and pioneering leader of progressive Christianity and the bestselling author of Why Christianity Must Change or Die and Eternal Life explains why a literal reading of the Gospels is actually heretical, and how this mistaken notion only entered the church once Gentiles had pushed out all the Jewish followers of Jesus.

A man who has consciously and deliberately walked the path of Christ, John Shelby Spong has lived his entire life inside the Christian Church. In this profound and considered work, he offers a radical new way to look at the gospels today as he shows just how deeply Jewish the Christian Gospels are and how much they reflect the Jewish scriptures, history, and patterns of worship. Pulling back the layers of a long-standing Gentile ignorance, he reveals how the church’s literal reading of the Bible is so far removed from these original Jewish authors’ intent that it is an act of heresy.

Using the Gospel of Matthew as a guide, Spong explores the Bible’s literary and liturgical roots—its grounding in Jewish culture, symbols, icons, and storytelling tradition—to explain how the events of Jesus’ life, including the virgin birth, the miracles, the details of the passion story, and the resurrection and ascension, would have been understood by both the Jewish authors of the various gospels and by the Jewish audiences for which they were originally written. Spong makes clear that it was only after the church became fully Gentile that readers of the Gospels took these stories to be factual, distorting their original meaning.

In Biblical Literalism: A Gentile Heresy, Spong illuminates the gospels as never before and provides a better blueprint for the future than where the church’s leaden and heretical reading of the story of Jesus has led us—one that allows the faithful to live inside the Christian story in the modern world.

Growing up on South Whidbey Island, Washington, Mark K. Sargent started his career playing computer games professionally in Boulder Colorado. From there he spent the next 20 years training people in proprietary software. In 2014, he looked into what is no doubt the most ridiculous conspiracy ever, called "Flat Earth Theory", and through extensive research, discovered that it wasn't so laughable after all.

Early in 2015, he released a series of YouTube videos titled "Flat Earth Clues", which delves into the possibility of our human civilization actually being inside a "Truman show"-like enclosed system, and how it's been hidden from the public since 1956.

Rachi Wortham, the former director of player personnel at Oregon State, has been selected to join the Montana men’s basketball staff as an assistant under Grizzly head coach Travis DeCuire.

 

Rachi (pronounced Rah-shee) comes to Montana after spending two seasons at Oregon State working under former Griz head coach Wayne Tinkle.

 

No stranger to the Big Sky Conference, Wortham served as an assistant coach at Eastern Washington from 2007-2011 under Kirk Earlywine. Wortham is also an EWU alumnus, where he was a standout guard from 2003-05, and was part of the Eagles’ first trip to the NCAA Tournament in 2004.

 

“I know Montana. I was at Eastern Washington for a long time, and I’ve seen the way they hold themselves, the way they prepare, the way they compete. They compete like winners, so I’m excited to be part of that mentality,” says Wortham.

 

Wortham and DeCuire’s prior relationship dates back to the mid 90’s when he played AAU basketball under DeCuire at the age of 15 in his hometown of Tacoma, Wash.

 

“We go back a long way,” says Coach DeCuire. “I’ve watched him grow, I’ve watched him kick in doors for opportunities. We’re talking about a young man that has always had leadership qualities, but has developed into a strong leader and a strong mentor of young men, and we need more of that.”

 

In addition to coaching at the collegiate level, Wortham has used basketball as a means of outreach and leadership development for organizations such as TEAM ACCESS, the YMCA of Pierce and Kitsap Counties, the Boys & Girls Club, the Isaiah Thomas Basketball Camp and Lids Team Sports-Nike Team.

 

Wortham’s duties for the Grizzlies under Coach DeCuire will include academic advising, player mentoring, recruiting and community outreach.

Joyce Ekworomadu is a Nigerian-American born August 6, 1986 in Edmond, Oklahoma and raised in Dallas, TX. She attended Texas State University where she averaged 18.9pts/gm, was Southland Conference Player of the Year, led the team to the school’s first ever Conference championship​, became the 5th player in Texas state history to record over 1500 points and 600 rebounds, voted on the all-Decade team, ESPN CoSIDA All-academic team, 3rd Place – ESPN 3PT Shootout (2008), was Nominated for Female athlete of the year and graduated with a BBA in Marketing.

Post college, she played in the WNBA, Poland, Italy and is a current member of the National Nigerian Basketball Team. She has traveled to over 40 countries playing the game of basketball.