The Serviceberry
Robin Wall Kimmerer
October 25, 2026
Phillips Center for the Performing Arts
University of Florida
7 PM
Imagining Climate Change is honored to support the third annual citywide reading festival, “Gainesville Reads 2026,” presented by The Lynx Books.
The festival centers a month of free public programming around one book and invites its author to Gainesville for a keynote talk. This year’s book is Robin Wall Kimmerer’s The Serviceberry, named a Best Book of the Year by Scientific American, Forbes, and Library Journal.
How to attend the keynote talk
Tickets to Kimmerer’s October 25 keynote are available from the Phillips Center for the Performing Arts Box Office. Click here / follow this link to order tickets.
If ticket pricing is an inhibiting factor, accessible tickets are available from The Lynx Books. Click here / follow this link to request accessible tickets.
About The Serviceberry
Indigenous scientist and celebrated author of Braiding Sweetgrass, 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.”
About the Speakers
Robin Wall Kimmerer is a mother, scientist, professor, and enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. She is the author of The Democracy of Species (2021), New York Times bestseller Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants (2013), and Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses (2003). A 2022 MacArthur Fellow, Kimmerer lives in Syracuse, New York, where she is a SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor of Environmental Biology, and the founder 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.
Professor Kimmerer will discuss her work with Ginessa Mahar, Ph.D. Mahar is a librarian and anthropologist at the University of Florida, where she works at the intersection of libraries, archives, and cultural collections. Through research and community collaboration, her work and service focus on how academic institutions can care for Indigenous archival collections in respectful and responsible ways. She is interested in how library and archival collections represent, organize, and communicate history, culture, knowledge, and identity.
“The Serviceberry and “Gainesville Reads” are presented by The Lynx Books and co-sponsored by Imagining Climate Change and nearly two dozen community partners. See this page for a complete calendar of festival events and a list of the sponsors.