Scott Russell Sanders is the author of 20 books of fiction and nonfiction, including Hunting for Hope, Earth Works, and Divine Animal. Born in Tennessee and reared in Ohio, he studied science and literature at Brown University and earned a Ph.D. in English as a Marshall Scholar at the University of Cambridge. Following graduate school, he joined the faculty of Indiana University, where he recently retired as a distinguished professor of English.
For his writing, Sanders has won the Associated Writing Programs Creative Nonfiction Award, the John Burroughs Essay Award, the Lannan Literary Award, the Mark Twain Award, and the Indiana Authors Award, as well as fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. His work has appeared in such magazines as Harper’s, Orion, Audubon, and The Georgia Review and has been reprinted in The Art of the Essay, The Norton Reader, and more than a hundred other anthologies, including the annual Best American Essays. He was elected in 2012 to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His new collection of eco-science fiction, Dancing in Dreamtime, will be published in fall 2016, and a new edition of his classic documentary, Stone Country, will appear in 2017.
Sanders’ 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 continues to puzzle over why our species is knowingly degrading the conditions for life on Earth, and how—or if—we may be moved to live more wisely.
