Biography
Dan Kappus lived until age eighteen in the urban community of Decatur, Georgia, an inner suburb of Atlanta. Dan his most formative years involved in the Unitarian Universalist youth movement , the community of computer bulletin board users, and the Rocky Horror Picture Show. He is a proud graduate of Decatur High School.
At 18, Dan enrolled in Warren Wilson College in Swannanoa (Asheville) North Carolina, graduating with a BA in "Human Studies" in May 1998. Warren Wilson is a small school (formerly six hundred students, now eight hundred) where each student's individual contribution to the College community is an important part of the learning process. Students at Warren Wilson participate equally in the labour of running a college campus; each student works a fifteen-hour a week job in addition to his or her academic courseload. Campus politics are only imperfectly democratic but characterized by a high level of participation by students and faculty. Dan worked on the farm, ran the campus computer lab, fixed computers elsewhere on campus, and resurrected a coffeehouse and performance space called the "Sage Cafe" during his time at Warren Wilson. Intellectually, he was strongly affected during college by feminist, ethnographic, and humanist ideas. Equally influential were a summer abroad in Oaxaca, Mexico, and a winter break spent studying theologian James Cone at a settlement house for the homeless in Atlanta.
In 1999, Dan moved to San Francisco. He used skills learned at Warren Wilson to land jobs at technology firms during the dot-com boom. Most of Dan's work involved the maintenance of networked servers running some variant of Unix. When the dot-com bubble burst, he collected unemployment and studied Buddhism. Dan says that he's fallen in love with San Francisco.
In September 2001, Dan left for the Dominican Republic to be a Peace Corps Volunteer. During his 27 month commitment to Peace Corps, Dan worked to improve the health of the rural poor in the community where he lived. Notable amongst his projects during that time was the latrine-building project, as well as a chicken-raising project.
After brief stints in Tucson, Arizona and Seattle Washington, Dan moved back to San Francisco where he worked for two years in the part of the US Department of Agriculture that monitors how states implement the Federally-funded National School Lunch Program. The job required frequent travel, but he managed to fit in a practice period or so at San Francisco Zen Center. In October 2006, Dan moved to Bloomington, Illinois to be a graduate student in sociology at Illinois State University. He anticipates that he will write a thesis about the causes of international migration to a small midwestern town. In the scarce time when he's not working hard at his academic pursuits, Dan enjoys contra dancing, juggling, folk music, writing, and Zen practice.