IMMEDIATE RELEASE: 3-13-08 CONTACT: PUBLIC INFORMATION OFFICE
SILVER CITY--Sharman Apt Russell, a professor in the Humanities Department at WNMU, has been asked this March 27 to be one of four key speakers at the Author Dinner at Estes Park, Colorado for the Mountains and Plains Independent Booksellers
Association. The dinner is the centerpiece of the association's annual spring meeting which is attended by over a 100 bookstore owners and booksellers from around the West.
Russell will be discussing her newest book Standing in the Light: My Life as a Pantheist, forthcoming this June. Her publishers, Basic Books in New York, are financing her trip and providing each bookseller with a galley. Russell notes that this is an important opportunity for independent bookstore owners to see the book in advance. Later in the summer, she will be on a book tour for Standing in the Light in Denver, San
Francisco, Los Angeles, Portland, Santa Fe, and Albuquerque.
Russell is the author of some ten published books, including the recent Hunger: An Unnatural History (Basic Books, 2005) and An Obsession with Butterflies (Perseus Books, 2003). Her work has been translated into Spanish, German, Swedish, Italian, Portuguese, Chinese, and Russian. Her first collection of essays Songs of the Fluteplayer won the 1992 Mountain and Plains Independent Booksellers Association Book Award and took place in the Mimbres Valley, where Russell lived for fifteen years before moving to Silver City. Standing in the Light is about the author's return to country life, this time in the Gila Valley. Standing in the Light is also an exploration of the religious philosophy known as pantheism, the belief that the universe with all its existing properties and laws is an interconnected whole which can be considered sacred. In this latest book, Russell explores the roots of pantheism in Western culture, her own history with Quakerism, a year of living near the Gila River, and a season of bird-banding for the national bird-banding program MAPS.
Russell teaches writing skills at WNMU and will be offering an online Advanced Creative Writing class for graduate students this summer.
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