Join The Lynx Watch, Inc. for the keynote event of Gainesville Reads 2026: a visit from the esteemed Robin Wall Kimmerer. Kimmerer will be in conversation with Ginessa Mahar and Whitney Leigh Morris around her book, The Serviceberry. This talk will culminate our month of learning based around The Serviceberry, highlighting themes of generosity and economies of care that exist all around us, both in the natural world and in each other.
This event is sponsored by The Lynx Watch, Inc., the nonprofit arm of The Lynx Bookstore. Other sponsors are Visit Alachua County and the University of Florida Biodiversity Institute.
*Please note: If ticket price is an inhibiting factor, please reach out to store@thelynxbooks.com for alternative ticketing options. Ticket accessibility is sponsored by The Lynx Watch, Inc.
About The Serviceberry: From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Braiding Sweetgrass, a bold and inspiring vision for how to orient our lives around gratitude, reciprocity, and community, based on the lessons of the natural world.
As Robin Wall Kimmerer harvests serviceberries alongside the birds, she considers the ethic of reciprocity that lies at the heart of the gift economy. How, she asks, can we learn from Indigenous wisdom and the plant world to reimagine what we value most? Our economy is rooted in scarcity, competition, and the hoarding of resources, and we have surrendered our values to a system that actively harms what we love. Meanwhile, the serviceberry’s relationship with the natural world is an embodiment of reciprocity, interconnectedness, and gratitude. The tree distributes its wealth—its abundance of sweet, juicy berries—to meet the needs of its natural community. And this distribution ensures its own survival. As Kimmerer explains, “Serviceberries show us another model, one based upon reciprocity, where wealth comes from the quality of your relationships, not from the illusion of self-sufficiency.”
As Elizabeth Gilbert writes, Robin Wall Kimmerer is “a great teacher, and her words are a hymn of love to the world.” The Serviceberry is an antidote to the broken relationships and misguided goals of our times, and a reminder that “hoarding won’t save us, all flourishing is mutual.”
About Robin Wall Kimmerer: Robin Wall Kimmerer is a mother, scientist, decorated professor, and enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. She is the author of Bud Finds Her Gift, The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants, which has earned Kimmerer wide acclaim. Her first book, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses, was awarded the John Burroughs Medal for outstanding nature writing, and her other work has appeared in Orion, Whole Terrain, and numerous scientific journals. In 2022, Braiding Sweetgrass was adapted for young adults by Monique Gray Smith. This new edition reinforces how wider ecological understanding stems from listening to the earth’s oldest teachers: the plants around us.
Robin tours widely and has been featured on NPR’s On Being with Krista Tippett and in 2015 addressed the general assembly of the United Nations on the topic of “Healing Our Relationship with Nature.” Kimmerer is a SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor of Environmental Biology, and the founder and director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment, whose mission is to create programs which draw on the wisdom of both indigenous and scientific knowledge for our shared goals of sustainability. In 2022 she was named a MacArthur Fellow and she received the National Humanities Medal in 2023.
Robin launched her movement, Plant, Baby, Plant in 2025 as a way for individuals to be involved in loving the natural world around us.
Kimmerer’s interests in restoration include not only restoration of ecological communities, but restoration of our relationships to land. She holds a BS in Botany from SUNY ESF, an MS and PhD in Botany from the University of Wisconsin and is the author of numerous scientific papers on plant ecology, bryophyte ecology, traditional knowledge and restoration ecology. She lives on an old farm in upstate New York, tending gardens both cultivated and wild.
About Ginessa Mahar: Bio coming soon.
About Whitney Leigh Morris: Whitney is a creative director whose work explores sustainable “rightsized” homes, co-stewardship, and multigenerational living. She is a passionate advocate for smaller space & communal living as means of keeping the wellbeing of our planet and all of its inhabitants at the heart of our concept of Home. Through her organization One Shared Home, Whitney collaborates with nonprofits and teams who are dedicated to protecting and restoring natural environments, strengthening circular + resilient local networks, and building equitable communities in support of those working toward a greener and more just future of mutual flourishing. Every glorious morning, Whitney wakes up and asks herself a question akin to the one posed by Robin Wall Kimmerer in the author’s ongoing consideration of Skywoman: “… in return for this gift of a world on Turtle’s back, what will I give in return?”
