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Saundra Murray Nettles is a writer and scholar of environmental and educational psychology. She is the author of Crazy Visitation, a memoir of life with and without a brain tumor, and Necessary Spaces: Exploring the Richness of African American Childhood. She has published academic articles and book chapters on experiences of marginalized children, youth, and women in formal and informal learning environments.
A Fellow of the American Psychological Association (APA), she is a former president of the APA Society for Environmental, Population, and Conservation Psychology and co-founder and past president of Section 1 (Psychology of Black Women) of the APA Society for the Psychology of Women. Murray Nettles is the 2021 recipient of the Elizabeth Hurlock Beckman award for “excellence in education and inspirational leadership.” A Woodrow Wilson Women’s Studies Fellow of the Institute for Citizens and Scholars, her book, Necessary Spaces, won a 2015 Critics Choice award from the Educational Studies Association.
She is an alumna of Howard University and the University of Illinois Graduate School of Library and Information Science. Dr. Murray Nettles conducted educational research at the American Institutes for Research and the Johns Hopkins University Center for Social Organization of Schools and taught at several institutions, including the University of Maryland and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. As a retired professor and published poet, she is pursuing her lifelong interests in vernacular photography and history of architecture.