Peggy Beck is the author of poems, songs, essays, and novels who writes in the mountains of northern New Mexico where she is also an artist and musician. She daily chronicles the phenology of seasons, birds, plants, and creatures, and the effects of climate change on the fragile altiplano ecosystems of her habitat. She works to rehabilitate riparian areas in her watershed through education and hands-on projects.

Her most recent writing is Fox Went Out, a seasonal cycle of diverse poems that trace the wild terrain over which a Gray fox wanders—revealing the wits by which the fox navigates a changing habitat and human beings’ complicity in the unspooling of patterns and cycles in the natural world. These poems have been published in both on- line and print magazines; the collection as a whole is yet to be published.

She received her PhD in the History of Consciousness after writing a dissertation, The Way of the Fool, from the University of California, Santa Cruz, under the direction of Gregory Bateson (Steps to An Ecology of Mind and Mind and Nature) whose pioneering, essential work recognized that “the lunatic, the lover, and the poet/Are of imagination all compact.”

She is known for her research on fool archetypes and ritual clowns and has written about the Fool in all its guises, from the tiniest of quanta to its role as a universal guide of souls or psychopomp, who reveals the patterns of the universe by way of creative double binds, nonsense, and clown dramas.
She is presently at work on a multi-faceted non-scholarly book about Fools which explores the primordial and the perennial figures of the Fool, the historically corrupting misogyny of the trickster, and celebrates the quest of the jest.’

Peggy Beck has authored works under the names, P. V. Beck, P. Beck, Peg Beck, Peggy V. Beck, Peggy Beck, and Ailm Travler.