J.D. CORTESE

I can't condense my whole story in one page, but I would say that I have always followed the advice of Carlos Castaneda: Live trying to find the path with heart.

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My interests have always affected more than one area of my life. Searching for knowledge led me to become a teacher that’s always trying to explain that knowledge. My early years with martial arts (judo) led to learning Eastern philosophy, changing my later relationship with religion. And my interest in recording observations (with words and images) to understand the passage of time infused my life’s work with writing and photography, both as a hobby and professionally. This was true whether I was writing short stories and novels in two languages, trying photojournalism, or using lasers to capture never-before-seen images of the dynamic word inside cells.

 

I studied Biochemistry as a career but taught all the “food groups” of science: Biology, Chemistry, Physics, and all the disciplines in between. My early love for physics continued after I stopped doing lab research and teaching medical students. The same passion that took me to learn enough math—and almost enough German—to read the original Einstein’s papers in relativity has an afterlife in my wall of books about cosmology and the physics of time.

 

My two children were born in the South, and my wife and I finally settled in a city that gets better and more beautiful every year, North Carolina’s Durham. Since then, I have served the Triangle community in many roles. I was the Faculty Advisor for a Hispanic association at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. While chairing sciences at our local community college, I represented it at the Board of Durham’s North Carolina Museum of Life and Science. And when my interested in the sport of table tennis rekindled, I served as organizer for the NC Senior Games for over a decade. I now act as the Representative for Durham County to the North Carolina Writers' Network.

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All paths are paths of the soul, and they grow our connection with humanity. Coming from a conservative Catholic upbringing, life has guided me to a broader understanding of humanity and a less definitive rule book to judge it.  As someone who has seen tanks in the streets, and fascism growing in an otherwise highly educated country, the Argentina of my youth, I am a strong defender of the democratic values that (should) characterize the country for most of my life, the United States. After traveling the world to dozens of countries and living for two years in China, my life added yet another layer of comprehension for the diversity of cultures that form the world.