The 2023 Walter Harding Lecture will be delivered by SUNY Distinguished Professor of Environmental Biology Robin Wall Kimmerer on Thursday, October 19, 2023 at 6:15 p.m. in Wadsworth Auditorium. This event is free and open to the public.

Mother, scientist, enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, and a 2022 MacArthur Fellow, Kimmerer is the author, most recently, of Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants (Milkweed Editions, 2013).

Her first book, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses (Oregon State UP, 2003), was awarded the John Burroughs Medal for outstanding nature writing. Her other work has appeared in Orion, Whole Terrain, and numerous scientific journals.

Inaugurated in 2004, the annual Walter Harding Lecture at SUNY Geneseo is sponsored by the Department of English through the generous support of the Harding family. SUNY Distinguished Professor of English Walter Harding taught in Geneseo's English department from 1956 to 1982 and was one of the twentieth century's foremost scholars of American transcendentalist writer Henry David Thoreau. The lecture honors Harding's life and legacy.