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The Mary Ann Key Book Club has returned! The selection for our 2026 season is The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer. Hear more about this season's selection from Hennepin County Library Director Scott Duimstra and book club co-founder Myron Medcalf.
(YouTube, 01:42 duration)
Robin Wall Kimmerer is a mother, scientist, decorated professor, and enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation.
 She is the author of The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants, and Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses.
She lives in Syracuse, New York, where she is a SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor of Environmental Biology, and the founder and director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment.
To Robin Wall Kimmerer, community and connectedness are our only paths to save this planet – and ourselves.
“When someone gives us a gift, we’re filled with gratitude and we want to give them a gift back,” she said recently during an interview with the Museum of Science in Boston. “Where if it’s a commodity or if it’s something I just bought, I don’t have any relationship with the clerk or the store. I’ve paid my money – no relationships. Whereas if it’s a gift, it cultivates mutual responsibility. And I fear that one of the reasons that we are here on the precipice of climate catastrophe is that we’ve been thinking about the world as if we owned it, as if we were in charge, not as if it were a gift for which we have moral responsibility.”
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In The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World – the latest selection for the Mary Ann Key Book Club – Kimmerer is clear that our relationship to the land demands a sense of thankfulness and a focus on our humanity. Our selection of this Indigenous author’s popular title comes at a time when Minnesotans have understood that if one of us faces the threat of violence, the disruption of our lives and the uncertainty of our safety, then we are all in jeopardy of enduring those same daunting circumstances. And the bond Kimmerer promotes may be the only way to stabilize a turbulent world, both figuratively and literally.
Yet, Kimmerer’s idea of a gift economy also means that those dark times can facilitate what we’ve witnessed here recently: an opportunity to challenge the forces of harm with unity.
“I don’t think market capitalism is going to vanish; the faceless institutions that benefit from it are too entrenched,” Kimmerer writes in The Serviceberry. “The thieves are very powerful. But I don’t think it’s pie in the sky to imagine that we can create incentives to nurture a gift economy that runs right alongside the market economy.”
That gift economy will require an acknowledgement that we need each other.
I’m anxious to talk to Kimmerer on May 13 at Central Library for our author talk. Because the message that resonates with me in her book is a message so many of us have embraced: no one is coming to rescue us, so we have to save ourselves.
Author Event
Wednesday, May 13, 6:30pm
Minneapolis Central Library
Join the Mary Ann Key Book Club for an exclusive evening at Pohlad Hall featuring Robin Wall Kimmerer, author of Braiding Sweetgrass and The Serviceberry. The author will be joined in conversation by Star Tribune columnist and book club partner Myron Medcalf. This event will be recorded and available for 7 days following the conversation.
Consider joining one of the local watch events during the author talk or participating in a book club discussion for this year’s selection at a local branch library between February and May. Find a list of these events and check back, as events will be added to the list throughout February.
Each newsletter we will highlight two local organizations that serve Native communities and/or support work around sustainability of our state’s incredible land and water resources. Readers are encouraged to learn more about these organizations, in the spirit of reciprocity that runs through this year’s Mary Ann Key title.
MIGIZI (“bald eagle” in Ojibwe) is a Minneapolis organization that provides a strong circle of support that nurtures the educational, social, economic, and cultural development of American Indian youth here in the Twin Cities.
Learning from Place: Bdote (with the Minnesota Humanities Center) is an independent nonprofit organization that offers participants immersive experiences tied to sites of great significance to Dakota people in the Twin Cities and allows individuals to learn from Dakota community members through stories and histories that have been too often omitted by others.
Reading lists
Wet Cloud: Open Mic for Poetry
Tuesday, February 17, 6:30-8pm
Minneapolis Central Library
Join us for an open mic event, led by Amar Agba, focusing on wet cloud poetry. Be creative and share your poetry. Also, check out the Fondly thinking… exhibit on display February 5-March 29 in Cargill Gallery on the second floor of Minneapolis Central Library.
Film Screening: Spotlight on Minnesota’s Triumphant African American Community
Saturday, February 21, 11-1:30pm
Hosmer Library
Join us for a showing of “Spotlight on Minnesota’s Triumphant African American Community,” a new documentary by Minnesota’s Black Community Project, directed and produced by Craig Rice and MindTwist Studio, LLC, Production Company. A Q&A period will follow the showing.
Author Talk: Nina McConigley in Conversation with V.V. Ganeshananthan
Saturday, March 7, 2-3pm
Plymouth Library
Join us for a conversation between award-winning authors Nina McConigley and V.V. Ganeshananthan, authors of "How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder" and "Brotherless Night,” respectively. Followed by Q&A. Books will be available for purchase and signing. Registration required.
About the Mary Ann Key Book Club
The book club was inspired by a Star Tribune column written by Myron Medcalf – the great-great-great-grandson of Mary Ann Key.
“I’m honored to partner with Hennepin County Library to launch the Mary Ann Key Book Club, named after the matriarch of my family, who was enslaved in Georgia in the 1850s. Purchased for $1,000 at the age of 14, Mary Ann Key persevered. Her body was in bondage, but slavery never stole the freedom of her heart, mind and soul. This book club is about focusing on the truths of the past, our challenges in the present and the possibilities of the future…”
– Myron Medcalf
This program is supported by Friends of the Hennepin County Library. Their generous financial support is helping to provide greater access to print and eBook copies of the featured books. Media partner: Star Tribune.
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