Sharman Apt Russell is the author of twelve books translated into nine languages. She is the recipient of the John Burroughs Medal for Distinguished Natural History Writing for Diary of a Citizen Scientist (Oregon State University Press, 2014, reissued by Open Roads Integrated Media, 2022), which also won the WILLA Award and was named by The Guardian as a top ten nature book. The Burroughs Medal was first given in 1926, and recipients include Aldo Leopold, Roger Tory Peterson, Rachel Carson, and contemporary writers like John McPhee and Barry Lopez. Her forthcoming nonfiction, What Walks This Way: Discovering the Wildlife Around Us Through Their Tracks and Signs (Columbia University Press, 2024), is an introduction to wildlife tracking and a call to reform wildlife management in North America. Her Within Our Grasp: Childhood Malnutrition Worldwide and the Revolution Taking Place to End It (Pantheon Books, 2021) combined her longtime interest in the environment with her longtime interest in hunger.
Sharman has just completed a time travel novel that takes place in the Miocene and is beginning a collection of lyrical essays called Ten Animals that Embroider My Life and Death. Her memoir about test pilots and the Mojave Desert is being sent out into the world. Recent fiction includes the award-winning Knocking on Heaven’s Door (Skyhorse Publishing, 2016), an eco-sci-fi set in a Paleoterrific future, and the YA Teresa of the New World (Skyhorse Publishing, 2015), a story of plagues in the sixteenth-century American Southwest.
Sharman’s Standing in the Light: My Life as a Pantheist was one of Booklist’s top ten books in religion. Her Hunger: An Unnatural History was written with the help of a Rockefeller Fellowship. Her essays have been published in many magazines, journals, and anthologies. She has also been awarded a Writers at Work Fellowship, Henry Joseph Jackson Award, Pushcart Prize, Arizona Authors Award, New Mexico/Arizona Book Award, and Mountains and Plains Booksellers Award. She has thrice judged the PEN Award in Children’s Literature.
- BS in Conservation and Natural Resources, University of California, Berkeley
- MFA in Creative Writing, University of Montana, Missoula
My goal as a teacher is to increase a student’s authority as a writer. I am here to encourage and support that authority. I can help students better revise their work. I can teach students how to talk about writing with other writers. I can help them feel more centered in who they are as writers and why they write. I can serve as an editor and mentor. I can model a writer’s life. As well as teaching at WNMU and Antioch University, for the last fifteen years, I have been a visiting writer at universities and colleges across the country. My areas of particular interest are creative nonfiction (personal essay and research-based prose), children’s literature, nature writing, science writing, environmental issues, and social justice.
- Within Our Grasp: Feeding the World’s Children for a Better and Greener Future (Pantheon Publishing, 2019)
- Knocking on Heaven’s Door (Skyhorse/Yucca Publishers, 2016)
- Teresa of the New World (Skyhorse/Yucca Publishers, 2015)
- Diary of a Citizen Scientist: Chasing Tiger Beetles and Other New Ways of Engaging the World (Oregon State University Press, 2014)
- Standing in the Light: My Life as a Pantheist (Basic Books, 2008, reprinted by Horseshoe Press, 2016)
- Hunger: An Unnatural History (Basic Books, 2005)
- An Obsession with Butterflies: Our Long Love Affair with a Singular Insect (Perseus Books, 2003)
- Anatomy of a Rose: Exploring the Secret Life of Flowers (Perseus Books, March, 2001)
- The Last Matriarch (University of New Mexico Press, 2000, reprinted by Horseshoe Press, 2016)
- When the Land was Young: Reflections on American Archaeology (Addison-Wesley, 1996, re-issued by University of Nebraska Press, 2001, reprinted by Horseshoe Press, 2016)
The Humpbacked Fluteplayer (Knopf Publishing for Young Readers, 1994) - Kill the Cowboy: A Battle of Mythology in the New West (Addison-Wesley, 1993, re-issued by University of Nebraska Press, 2001, reprinted by Horseshoe Press, 2016)
- Songs of the Fluteplayer: Seasons of Life in the Southwest (Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1991, reissued by University of Nebraska Press, 2002, reprinted by Horseshoe Press, 2016)
- 2016 John Burroughs Medal for Distinguished Nature Writing for Diary of a Citizen Scientist
- 2016 New Mexico/Arizona Book Awards Winner in science fiction and Arizona Authors Association Awards Winner in fiction for Knocking on Heaven’s Door
- 2016 May Sarton Young Adult finalist and WILLA Finalist for Children’s Literature, Women Writing the West, for Teresa of the New World
- 2015 WILLA Award for Nonfiction, Women Writing the West, for Diary of a Citizen Scientist
- 2015 Arizona Authors Association Awards Winner for Teresa of the New World
- 2015 New Mexico/Arizona Book Awards Finalist for Diary of a Citizen Scientist and Teresa of the New World
- 2009 New Mexico Book Awards Finalist and Booklist’s Top Ten Books in Religion for Standing in the Light: My Life as a Pantheist
- 2009, 2003 WNMU Research Award for Excellence
- 2003, 2007, 2012 PEN West judge for Children’s Literature
- 2003 Independent Bookseller Recommendations, Book Sense 76 for An Obsession with Butterflies
- 2002 Rockefeller Foundation Residency, Bellagio, Italy
- 1992 Mountain and Plains Booksellers Award for Songs of the Fluteplayer
- 1992 New Mexico Presswomen’s Zia Award for Songs of the Fluteplayer
- 1990 Pushcart Prize, essay “Illegal Aliens” published in Pushcart Prize Anthology XV
- 1989, Writers at Work Fellowship Winner in Nonfiction, Park City, Utah
- 1989, Henry Joseph Jackson Award in Nonfiction, San Francisco, CA
- American Nature Writing in the Twenty-first Century
- Magic as Metaphor: Writing Children’s Literature
- Writing as Archaeology
- Living in Dreamtime: Writing the Book Proposal
- Writing as the Other
- Writing as a Pantheist
- Writing down the World: Research-based Prose
- Writing and Teaching