Robin Wall Kimmerer

American botanist, professor of environmental and forest biology at SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry, enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, and one of the most-read living writers on the meeting of indigenous knowledge and Western science. Born 1953, Kimmerer trained as a plant ecologist and bryologist (her first book, Gathering Moss, won the John Burroughs Medal) before publishing Braiding Sweetgrass in 2013 — a work that has become a long-running bestseller and a foundational text in environmental humanities, gift-economy thinking, and the spirituality of attention. Her teaching reframes plants as elders and teachers, gratitude as a political act, and reciprocity as the underlying grammar of a livable world.