WriterScott Russell Sanders

Born in Tennessee and reared in Ohio, Scott Russell Sanders studied at Brown University before going on, as a Marshall Scholar, to earn a Ph.D. in English literature at Cambridge University.  In 1971 he joined the faculty of Indiana University, where he is Distinguished Professor of English, and where he has won the university’s highest teaching award.  Among his more than twenty books are novels, collections of stories, and works of personal nonfiction, including Staying Put, Writing from the Center, and Hunting for Hope.  His latest book is A Private History of Awe, a coming-of-age memoir, love story, and spiritual testament, which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.  He has received the Lannan Literary Award, the Associated Writing Programs Award in Creative Nonfiction, the Great Lakes Book Award, the Kenyon Review Literary Award, and the John Burroughs Essay Award, among other honors, and he has received support for his writing from the Lilly Endowment, the Indiana Arts Commission, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation.  In June 2006 he was named one of five inaugural winners of the Indiana Humanities Award.  In all of his books he is concerned with our place in nature, the pursuit of social justice, the character of community, 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.