Despite Sander's Southern origins and his numerous international and national awards and fellowships from such respected bodies such as the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the

Thus, the author's visual and geographical touchstone and point of contrast is forever Indiana. "If midwestern places are so grim and gray, why do writers keep recalling them, sometimes after decades of living far away? What draws the imagination back across the miles and years? The chief lure is the country itself; the forests, fields, and prairies, the wandering rivers, wide skies, dramatic weather, the creek beds lined with sycamores and limestone, the grasses and flowers, hawks and hickories, moths and cicadas and secretive deer. Again and again in literature about the Midwest you find a dismal, confining human realm - farm, village, or city - embedded in a mesmerizing countryside... By turns cruel and comforting, the land holds them, haunts them, and lingers in their memory and bones." (Sanders 84)

Sanders was born in 1945 in Memphis, Tennessee, and moved to Ohio with his family as a child. He was exposed to many contrasting environments in his childhood, from the farm in Tennessee where he was born to a military arsenal in Ohio, to Rhode Island and finally to Cambridge University in England-yet he always returned to Indiana, where he remains with his wife, who is also a professor at Indiana University, where he is one of the luminaries of the school's graduate program in writing. (Our Land, Our Literature-Scott Russell Sanders, 2002)

Along the lines of his hero Thoreau, Sanders has additionally taken a strong stand on issues of national policy, and not merely environmentalist policy. After the attacks of September 11th against the World Trade Towers, Sanders wrote in the literary publication Orion, "I think the attack demonstrates the folly as well as the immorality of using violence to impose our will on others, and so I am dismayed to hear so many voices, both inside and outside the government, responding to the atrocity by threatening vengeance, by calling for greater military spending, by promising war. I think the attack demonstrates the folly of building a nuclear missile shield, both because the money for such a technological fantasy will be drained away from humanitarian purposes (at home and abroad), and because there are clearly easier ways to attack a complex technological society than by firing nuclear-tipped missiles." (Sanders, Orion Magazine, 2001) He was unafraid, even right after the attacks, on the publications' release date online of September 17th, to advance what were unpopular and radical

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Approximate Word count = 1645
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page double spaced)