Stewart Burns, Chair and Professor of Ethical & Creative Leadership and of Martin Luther King Jr. Studies at Union Institute & University, earned his Ph.D. at The University of California Santa Cruz,  and has previously taught at Santa Cruz, Berkeley, Stanford, Williams, and Antioch.

The second, significantly expanded, edition of his widely admired biography of Martin Luther King, To the Mountaintop: Martin Luther King Jr.’s Mission and the Movement That Made Him, winner of the 2005 Wilbur Award, is not only the most lucid and comprehensive one-volume biography of Dr. King, but the only one that fully explores his spiritual journey and lived theology and their impact on his leadership, will soon be published.

Burns’ first book, Social Movements of the 1960s: Searching for Democracy, was the most widely used college text on the subject. At the King Papers Project at Stanford, he edited volume 3 on the Montgomery bus boycott, Birth of a New Age. He produced the first full history of the bus boycott, Daybreak of Freedom, made into an HBO feature film Boycott, on which he consulted. Boycott won the NAACP Image Award. He edited Cosmic Companionship, a narrative compilation of King’s spritual teachings and recently published We Will Stand Here Till We Die: Freedom Movement Shakes America.

Stewart Burns lives in the Berkshires of Massachusetts with his wife, photographer Deborah Lee Schneer, and their beloved golden retriever, Happy-Go-Lucky.