Friends of the library
annual meeting

Scott Russell Sanders, Guest speaker

Photo: Steve Raymer

Born in Tennessee and reared in Ohio, Scott Russell Sanders studied at Brown University, where he was valedictorian, and earned his Ph.D. as a Marshall Scholar at the University of Cambridge.  He is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English at Indiana University, where he taught from 1971 to 2009, and where he earned the university’s highest teaching award.  Among his twenty books are novels, collections of stories, and works of personal nonfiction, including Staying Put (1993), Writing from the Center (1995), and Hunting for Hope (1998).  His memoir, A Private History of Awe (2006), was nominated by the publisher for a Pulitzer Prize.  His latest book is A Conservationist Manifesto (2009), which envisions a shift from a culture based on consumption to one based on caretaking.  For his writing, Sanders has won the Associated Writing Programs Creative Nonfiction Award, the John Burroughs Essay Award, the Lannan Literary Award, the Indiana Humanities Award, and the Mark Twain Award.  His work has appeared in such magazines as Orion, Audubon, and The Georgia Review, and it has been reprinted in The Art of the Essay, The Norton Reader, and more than fifty other anthologies, including the annual Best American Essays.  His writing examines the human place in nature, the character of community, the relation between culture and geography, and the search for a spiritual path.  He and his wife, Ruth, a biochemist, have reared two children in their hometown of Bloomington in the hardwood hill country of Indiana’s White River Valley. 

To learn more about Scott Russell Sanders, visit his web page: http://www.scottrussellsanders.com/