On Wednesday, October 26 at 7:00 pm, Dr. Sharman Apt Russell will give the public lecture A New Paradigm: Why Business may be the Key to Ending World Hunger in Hewson Hall’s Fitzpatrick Auditorium. All are invited.
The abstract for her talk is as follows:
A quarter of the world’s children are damaged physically and mentally due to a lack of food and nutrients. This is old news. Humans have lived with hunger for a very long time. Today, more and more people working to prevent childhood malnutrition are turning to the crucial role of business and industry in all its many shapes and forms. In her travels to Malawi and India, some of the poorest countries in the world, author Sharman Apt Russell has explored what programs successfully address childhood malnutrition and why. If empowering women is centrally important, so are revving up local economies, supporting smallholder farmers, and building markets and infrastructure. As an environmentalist and science writer, Russell is particularly interested in the connections between healthy children and a healthy Earth. As someone who had long worked with hunger in New Mexico, her talk this Wednesday will include what child malnourishment looks like in Alabama and other parts of America.
Dr. Russell has published a dozen books that have been translated into nine languages. Her Diary of a Citizen Scientist won the 2016 John Burroughs Medal for Distinguished Natural History Writing. Her Within Our Grasp: Childhood Malnutrition Worldwide and the Revolution Taking Place to End It highlights the alignment of environmental and humanitarian goals. Awards she has received include a Rockefeller Fellowship for her Hunger: An Unnatural History, a Pushcart Prize, the New Mexico/Arizona Book Award, and Writers at Work Award. She and her husband have two adult children and live in the American Southwest. Dr. Russell teaches in the MFA program of Antioch University in Los Angeles and is a professor emeritus at Western New Mexico University in Silver City.