Robin Wall Kimmerer Biography

Robin Wall Kimmerer is a professor of environmental biology and a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. Born in 1953, she received her bachelor’s degree in botany from the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry (SUNY-ESF). She proceeded to obtain both a master’s and a doctoral degree in botany from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. After teaching at Transylvania University and Centre College, Kimmerer rejoined SUNY-ESF as faculty in 1993 and was later named Distinguished Teaching Professor of Environmental Biology. As a public speaker, Kimmerer has often shared her ideas with both scholarly and lay audiences; in 2015, she presented “Healing Our Relationship with Nature” to the United Nations General Assembly. Her research interests include restoration ecology and traditional land management techniques. 

Kimmerer’s first book for a general readership was Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses (2003), which received the John Burroughs Medal for outstanding nature writing in 2005. Braiding Sweetgrass, published in 2013, builds on the previous book’s premise of connecting Indigenous and scientific perspectives to present a fuller picture of the natural world. Widely praised by reviewers, Braiding Sweetgrass won the Sigurd F. Olson Nature Writing Award in 2014.