2025–26 Big Read Reveal!

The Purdue English Department's 2025–26 Big Read selection is Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. 

Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants is a bestselling work of nature writing and cultural reflection by Robin Wall Kimmerer, an esteemed botanist, professor, and citizen of the Potawatomi Nation. Blending memoir, ecology, and Indigenous philosophy, this book reflects on the reciprocal relationship between humans and the natural world.

Deeply informative and poetic, Braiding Sweetgrass invites readers to see the earth not as a commodity, but as a gift. Through anecdotes of gathering wild strawberries, restoring wetlands, and braiding sweetgrass, Kimmerer explores the ethics of gratitude, caretaking, and environmental stewardship. Whether describing the "grammar of animacy" in Indigenous languages or the scientific marvels of mosses, she bridges traditional ecological knowledge with Western science, offering a unique and compelling vision of unity between plants and people. Widely celebrated, Braiding Sweetgrass has become a touchstone in environmental literature, inspiring readers across disciplines. 

Kimmerer serves as the founding director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment, is the co-founder and past president of the Traditional Ecological Knowledge section of the Ecological Society of America, and has received numerous accolades for her writing and advocacy. Through her work, Kimmerer continues to foster conversations regarding sustainability, Indigenous sovereignty, and our responsibilities as inhabitants of a living world.  

Praise for Braiding Sweetgrass:

• "I give daily thanks for Robin Wall Kimmerer for being a font of endless knowledge, both mental and spiritual."
  -Richard Powers, New York Times

• "Robin Wall Kimmerer is a writer of rare grace. She writes about the natural world from a place of such abundant passion that one can never quite see the world the same way after having seen it through Kimmerer's eyes."
  -Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love
  
  
• "It is the way she captures beauty that I love the most—the images of giant cedars and wild strawberries, a forest in the rain and a meadow of fragrant sweetgrass will stay with you long after you read the last page."
  -Jane Goodall
  
  
• "It's a book absorbed with the unfolding of the world to observant eyes—that sense of discovery that draws us in."
  -NPR

Join us for another exciting year of the Purdue English Big Read!