Sharman Apt Russell

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.