Welcome to Love of Place. Most of my work celebrates our connection to the natural world.

Most recently, my Knocking on Heaven's Door is the winner in the category of science fiction in the 2016 New Mexico/Arizona Book Awards and in the category of fiction in the 2016 Arizona Authors Association Awards. A number of reviewers have been enthusiastic, including the website Geeks of Doom, which makes me smile. Not many people know me as a geek of doom! But I am happy to embrace the complexity of my personality.

I'm also so pleased that Diary of a Citizen Scientist: Chasing Tiger Beetles and Other New Ways of Engaging the World has been awarded the 2016 John Burroughs Medal for Distinguished Nature Writing, as well as the 2014 WILLA Award for Creative Nonfiction from Women Writing the West.

My historical fantasy Teresa of the New World won the 2015 Arizona Authors Association Award for best Children's Literature and was a finalist for the New Mexico/Arizona Book Award for Children's Literature, the WILLA Award for Children's Literature, and the May Sarton Award for Children's Literature.

These are nice landmarks in a writer's life. I would be writing regardless--but, still, whew. It's good to have some encouragement.

Feel free to contact me at http://www.sharmanaptrussell.com or through my author Facebook page, Sharman Apt Russell.


Saturday, June 28, 2014



Recently I have been in Los Angeles teaching at Antioch University. A few weeks ago I was in a city in northern Spain, watching the narrow streets fill with people of all ages—coming together to eat and drink and enjoy each other. As an environmentalist, I believe that the cultural conversation has shifted to green cities—walkable, livable, lovable, filled with beauty and art--the hope now for our relationship to the planet. Cities are where 85 percent of Americans now live, where humans will use the least resources and emit the fewest greenhouse gases, where creativity sparks in the diminished spaces between us, where we’ll contain the damage of overpopulation. Long ago, in the 1980s, my husband and I were back-to-the-landers, believing we were on the cutting edge of social change. We were part of a larger cultural conversation, wanting to root our lives in soil and sun, to make the world better by making our personal connections to the natural world more direct in the shape of an onion or an adobe brick—with a home-built house and a too-big garden and two homebirths and two goats and too much goat cheese in the refrigerator. Today I am acutely aware that living in the rural West is less ecologically sound than living in places like Madrid or Portland. I am not unhappy that the ideas of my youth—the very arc of my life--have been proven wrong. I’m only relieved that the cultural conversation is still alive. I’m pleased hope still exists.

1 comment:

Claire said...

For me a city where you can walk everywhere is a kind of paradise. I lived just outside Venice for a while and used to visit every weekend. A city with no cars! Wow!

In countries like Wales and England, the problem with the rural lifestyle is that unless you drive you can be a long way from hospitals, dentists and work. Our modern economy simply makes it easier to live together.