Parker Palmer

American author, educator, and activist (born 1939)

Parker J. Palmer is an American author, educator, and activist who focuses on issues in education, community, leadership, spirituality and social change. He has published ten books and numerous essays and poems, and is founder and Senior Partner Emeritus of the Center for Courage and Renewal. His work has been recognized with major foundation grants, several national awards, and thirteen honorary doctorates.

Palmer was born in Chicago on February 28, 1939, and grew up in Wilmette and Kenilworth, Illinois. He studied philosophy and sociology at Carleton College, where he graduated in 1961 before going on to complete a Doctor of Philosophy degree in sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. which oversees the "Courage to Teach" program for K–12 educators across the country and parallel programs for people in other professions, including medicine, law, ministry and philanthropy. He has published a dozen poems, more than one hundred essays and ten books. Palmer's work has been recognized with thirteen honorary doctorates, two Distinguished Achievement Awards from the National Educational Press Association, an Award of Excellence from the Associated Church Press, and grants from the Danforth Foundation, the Lilly Endowment and the Fetzer Institute. Palmer has been featured on the On Being podcast with Krista Tippet, and regularly contributes to the On Being blog.

In 1993, Palmer won the national award of the Council of Independent Colleges for Outstanding Contributions to Higher Education. In 1998, The Leadership Project, a national survey of 10,000 administrators and faculty, named Palmer as one of the thirty “most influential senior leaders” in higher education and one of the ten key “agenda setters” of the past decade: “He has inspired a generation of teachers and reformers with evocative visions of community, knowing, and spiritual wholeness.”
In 2001, the Carleton College Alumni Association gave Palmer a Distinguished Achievement Award. In 2002, the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education created the “Parker J. Palmer Courage to Teach Award”, given annually to the directors of ten medical residency programs that exemplify patient centered professionalism in medical education. In 2003, the American College Personnel Association named Palmer a “Diamond Honoree” for outstanding contributions to the field of student affairs. In 2005, Sam Intrator (ed.) published Living the Questions: Essays Inspired by the Work and Life of Parker J. Palmer (San Francisco: Jossey Bass, 2005). In 2010, the Religious Education Association (An Association of Professors, Practitioners, and Researchers in Religious Education) presented Palmer with the William Rainey Harper Award, “given to outstanding leaders whose work in other fields has had profound impact upon religious education.” Named after the first president of the University of Chicago, founder of the REA, the award has been given only ten times since its establishment in 1970. Previous recipients include Marshall McLuhan, Elie Wiesel, Margaret Mead and Paulo Freire. In 2011, Palmer was named an Utne Reader Visionary, one of "25 people who are changing your world." In 2017, Palmer was given the Shalem Institute’s Contemplative Voices Award, given annually to an individual who has made significant contributions to contemplative understanding, living and leadership. In 2019, Palmer's book On the Brink of Everything: Grace, Gravity & Getting Old was the gold medalist in the "Aging/Death & Dying” category of the 2019 Independent Book Publisher Book Awards.