Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses

Robin Wall Kimmerer is a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, based in Oklahoma. Kimmerer’s family, however, ended up in upstate New York because this is where her maternal grandfather settled after leaving Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania. Kimmerer grew up in a rural area, spending most of her free time in the fields and woods, observing nature. Her parents encouraged this love of nature and gave her books on environmental science to read; when she went to college, she knew this was the career she wanted to pursue. Eventually, she obtained her PhD in plant ecology and became a researcher and professor. For a time, she taught at Transylvania University and Centre College in Kentucky while raising her two children, but eventually she returned to her home state of New York and to the State University of New York (SUNY), where she had received her undergraduate education. At SUNY, she focuses on land restoration and human relationships with the land and works with the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment, which she founded in 2006. In 2015, she was invited to be on a United Nations panel discussing sustainability and climate change, and in 2022 she was named a MacArthur Fellow.