From March 18-22, author Scott Russell Sanders will be in residence at Central College, and on March 21, he will read from his latest book, “Earth Works,” for the Writers Reading series.
Sanders studied physics and English at Brown University, graduating in 1967. With the aid of a Marshall Scholarship, he pursued graduate work at Cambridge University, where he completed his Ph.D. in English in 1971. He taught at Indiana University until his retirement in 2009.
Among his more than twenty books are novels, collections of stories and works of personal nonfiction. His latest books are “A Private History of Awe,” a coming-of-age memoir, love story and spiritual testament, and “A Conservationist Manifesto,” his vision of a shift from a culture of consumption to a culture of caretaking. His selected essays, drawn from three decades of writing, were published in a volume entitled “Earth Works” in January 2012.
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.
He is currently at work on a novel, a collection of short stories and a book about the meaning of wealth. His writing examines the human place in nature, the pursuit of social justice, 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.
Sanders will read selected essays at the Writers Reading in the Cox-Snow Recital Hall at 7:30 p.m. The event is free and open to the public. He is also available to speak in classes during his residency. Please contact Treva Reimer at reimert@central.edu for more information.
This event was made possible by a grant from Humanities Iowa and the National Endowment for the Humanities. The series was established in 1987 to promote an appreciation of books and their authors. The series features locally, nationally and internationally known writers who read and discuss their works.
