Earl B. Russell

Earl B. Russell is an unusual author, blogger, and retired professor. His books are Meanderings and Mullings (2017) and his bestselling, tragicomic Cold Turkey at Nine: The Memoir of a Problem Child (2013). His writings have appeared in the New York Times, the Arizona Republic, and the Austin American-Statesman. His books and his blog are intended to inform, entertain, inspire, and stimulate thought.

Both of his books are nonfiction for a general audience and they cover a span of time from before his birth to 2017. His 2013 memoir revealed a dark family secret he kept from his friends and colleagues for over forty years, the death of his paranoid schizophrenic mother at his father's hands. While his father's case was finally adjudicated in the Tennessee Supreme Court, the effect of the tragedy on him and his family was and is lasting.

He spent much of his career writing for dozens of academic publications, including journal articles and research reports. He held academic positions at the University of Georgia, Ohio State University, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He retired as professor emeritus after finishing his academic career as a department head at Nebraska.

He owns a prized rubber chicken that hangs in his study as a reminder to lighten up. He does this by calling on his problem child tendencies, joking, and looking for laughs.

He has two adult children, Joy and Robert. He is married to Ellen Summerfield Russell, a painter and educator, and they live in lively Austin, Texas.