Jennifer Atkinson TWTS 2021 Keynote Speaker: “Eco-Grief & Climate Anxiety: In a time when there is so much bad news, how do we learn to cope?”

Dr. Jennifer Atkinson is an Associate Professor of environmental humanities at the University of Washington, Bothell. Her seminars on Eco-Grief & Climate Anxiety have been featured in The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, the Seattle Times, NBC News, Grist, Medium, KUOW, and many other outlets. Jennifer works with psychologists, artists, scientists, and community groups to provide resources for navigating the emotional toll of our climate crisis. She recently received a grant from the Rachel Carson Center in Munich to co-facilitate an interdisciplinary project titled "An Existential Toolkit for Climate Justice Educators” with a global team of scholars and activists.

Jennifer is also the author of Gardenland: Nature, Fantasy and Everyday Practice, a book that explores garden literature as a "fantasy genre" where people enact desires for community, social justice, joyful labor, and contact with nature. Her writing on the history of gardening in hard times has been featured on programs like NPR, The Conversation, and Earth Island Journal. She holds a PhD in English Literature & Language from the University of Chicago, and lives in Seattle where she’s taught at the University of Washington for the past 11 years.