Robin Wall Kimmerer

Robin Wall Kimmerer is a botanist, writer and enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. Trained in botany at SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry and the University of Wisconsin, she became a SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor of Environmental Biology. She also founded the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment at SUNY ESF.

Her nonfiction joins scientific observation with Indigenous knowledge, personal narrative and close attention to plants. Reciprocity is central to her work: people receive food, medicine and instruction from the living world, she argues, and therefore carry obligations in return. Her writing moves easily from moss ecology and maple sugaring to language, restoration and the ethics of harvesting.

Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses received the John Burroughs Medal for distinguished nature writing. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants, published in 2013, became a national bestseller and was adapted for young adults by Monique Gray Smith. Kimmerer was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2022 and received the 2023 National Humanities Medal.

Begin with Braiding Sweetgrass. Its essays offer the broadest introduction to Kimmerer’s thought, braiding botany, Potawatomi teachings and lived experience. Chapters on the gift of strawberries, the Three Sisters garden and the honorable harvest make its argument concrete: knowledge becomes meaningful when it changes how we receive and reciprocate the gifts of the earth.