I write about food, religion, sustainability, and the outdoors. I started off writing about Hinduism and India, and I talked about the role of food in Krishna devotion in my first book Singing Krishna: Sound Becomes Sight in Paramanand’s Poetry (SUNY 2008). My interest in food and agriculture grew during my years teaching at Iowa State University, and my experience there led me to my second book Growing Stories from India: Religion and the Fate of Agriculture (University Press of Kentucky 2011) which focuses on food, sustainable agriculture, and narrative and includes a foreward by Vandana Shiva. My third book, tentatively entitled “Being the Change: Food, Sustainability, and Intentional Communities”, asks how intentional communities translate their values such as social justice, voluntary simplicity, and nonviolence into practice.
My first book Singing Krishna: Sound Becomes Sight in Paramanand’s Poetry (SUNY 2008) focuses on Braj devotional traditions and explores the role of devotional poetry in ritual practice. I spent a year in temples in Vrindavan, a pilgrimage town in north India, listening to poetry sung to Krishna.
My second book Growing Stories from India: Religion and the Fate of Agriculture (University Press of Kentucky 2011) uses Hindu agricultural narratives to consider how we can provide food in a sustainable and just manner. I conducted fieldwork in Baldeo, India, examining narratives and practices related to Balaram, a deity associated with agriculture.
My third book Living Sustainably: What Intentional Communities Can Teach Us About Democracy, Simplicity,and Nonviolence was released in May 2017. I’ve visited intentional communities around the US, including ecovillages, Catholic Worker Houses and Farms, cohousing communities and both rural and urban communities to see how these communities are creating sustainable lifeways in community situations.
My blog Floridawaterscapes illustrates my current writing and research on Florida’s water and environment.
Whitney Sanford's Writing 