Mary Doria Russell was born near Chicago in 1950 to a Navy nurse and a Marine Corps drill sergeant and, as a consequence, had a remarkable if dismaying vocabulary prior to attending Sacred Heart Catholic Elementary School, where she learned discretion. She was an A student, a Girl Scout and a virgin bride, and waited until she was 29 to have her adolescent rebellion. She does not recommend this lifestyle to others, although it worked well enough for her.

A paleoanthropologist with specialties in bone biology and biomechanics, Dr. Russell did extended field work in Australia and Croatia. She had a great time, published a lot of stuff, won a bunch of awards and grants but eventually got fed up with Academe and quit. She spent four lucrative years writing computer manuals before beginning her novel, The Sparrow. Russell estimates that about 22 anthropologists, world-wide, read her academic publications and NOBODY ever reads computer manuals, so she figured that if even just her friends read her novel, she was way ahead in terms of readership because she has lots of friends. A recovering academic, she must still rely on a Higher Power to resist the impulse to footnote everything she writes.

Mary and Don Russell have been married for 27 years. In a row. To each other. Don is a software engineer and a prince among husbands. They have one son, Daniel, born in Croatia in 1985. Danny is entirely splendid except for being way too good at math. The Russells live in Cleveland, Ohio, and like it very much, thank you.

A convert to Judaism (and no, Don's not Jewish), Mary has maintained a connection with Catholic education in adulthood. She has a long association with St. Adalbert School, an extraordinarily effective inner city elementary school in a Cleveland neighborhood that the FBI once named the most violent in northeastern Ohio. For helping to raise over $330,000 in grants and contributions to the school's building fund, Mary was paid $1.00 a year and all the Nescafe Instant Coffee she could drink, which isn't much because Nescafe is awful. Half of her advance for The Sparrow went to to St. Adalbert's, to help build a library for the school.