I’m Adrienne Ross Scanlan, an award-winning writer, nonfiction editor of the Blue Lyra Review, and author of the narrative nonfiction manuscript, Turning Homeward: Restoring Nature in the Urban Wild.  I’ve explored the Pacific Northwest’s nature (inside or outside the city) as a lay naturalist, a restoration volunteer, and a citizen scientist. From these and other experiences have come nature writing, personal essays, and other creative nonfiction published in The Fourth River, Pilgrimage, Under the Sun, the American Nature Writing anthologies, A Natural History of Now: reports from the edge of nature, and other publications.   I’ve received an Artist Trust Literature Fellowship, a Seattle Arts Commission literary award, and my essay “Salvage” was recognized as “notable” in the Best American Science and Nature Writing 2002.

My manuscript, Turning Homeward – Restoring Hope and Nature in the Urban Wild, is a place-based, narrative nonfiction book about the journey of a newcomer to the Pacific Northwest who learns that home isn’t where you live but where you create belonging by repairing the nature that is close to our lives.  Turning Homeward will be published by Mountaineers Books in fall / winter 2016.

I live in Seattle, WA with my husband (a scientist and former English major), whom I met at a swing dance, and our daughter.  I’m a backyard city farmer (no chickens but plenty of strawberries) and a not-too-bad chess player who wakes every morning to the beautiful music of Artie Shaw playing “Begin the Beguine.”