Robin Wall Kimmerer

Robin Wall Kimmerer is a mother, scientist, decorated professor and enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. She is a SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor of Environmental Biology in Syracuse, New York, and the founder and director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment, whose mission is to create programs that draw on the wisdom of both indigenous and scientific knowledge toward shared goals of sustainability.

She is the author of Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants, The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World, and Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses, which received the John Burroughs Medal for outstanding nature writing. Her work has also appeared in Orion, Whole Terrain and numerous scientific journals. In 2022 Braiding Sweetgrass was adapted for young adults by Monique Gray Smith.

Her interest in restoration reaches beyond ecological communities to the restoration of our relationships to land. She holds a BS in Botany from SUNY ESF and an MS and PhD in Botany from the University of Wisconsin, and has written many scientific papers on plant ecology, bryophyte ecology, traditional knowledge and restoration ecology. She was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2022 and received the National Humanities Medal in 2023. In 2015 she addressed the United Nations general assembly on "Healing Our Relationship with Nature," and she has been featured on NPR's On Being with Krista Tippett.

She lives on an old farm in upstate New York, tending gardens both cultivated and wild. In 2025 she launched Plant, Baby, Plant, a movement inviting people to take part in loving the natural world around them.