From 1971 to 2009, Scott Russell Sanders, Ph.D., taught at Indiana University, where he was Distinguished Professor of English. The recipient of several teaching awards, he spent a year as writer-in-residence at Phillips Exeter Academy, and another year as visiting scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Concentrating on an examination of the human place in nature, the pursuit of social justice, the relation between culture and geography, and the search for a spiritual path, he has written more than 20 books — novels, collections of stories, and works of personal nonfiction.

Sanders has received the Lannan Literary Award, the Associated Writing Programs Award in Creative Nonfiction, the Great Lakes Book Award, the Kenyon Review Literary Award, the John Burroughs Essay Award, and the Indiana Humanities Award, among other honors, and has received support for his writing from the Lilly Endowment, the Indiana Arts Commission, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation. The Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature named him the 2009 winner of the Mark Twain Award.

Read For:

  • Celebrations of place, the natural world, and home
  • Poetic reframing of the spiritual practices of awe, hope, peace, and justice
  • Illustrations of how imagination can shed light on all aspects of life