Mother, Creature, Kin: Author Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder to Speak at CHC Annual Gathering
Author and thinker Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder is the guest speaker for this year’s Cold Hollow to Canada Annual Gathering. Chelsea and her family have made a home here in Vermont, but her life journey has taken her from the Great Plains, to the Pacific Northwest, and across New England from Maine to Massachusetts, to this new home here in the Green Mountain state.
Chelsea brings together the disciplines of ecology and spirituality through the lens of culture to bring meaning, truth, and hope to all who care for the future of this planet. Chelsea has a master of theological studies from Harvard Divinity School and has been a staff writer and editor for Emergence Magazine. In her 2025 highly acclaimed book Mother, Creature, Kin: What We Learn from Nature’s Mothers in a Time of Unraveling, she has explored what it means to “mother” and what “mothering” as a way of being can offer us all as we care for the earth.
As a new mother herself, Chelsea was deeply aware at the time of writing the book what it means to bring a child into a time of ecological collapse. She explores through a series of essays what other species can show us. Chelsea intertwines poetry, myth, science, story and spirituality in a beautiful and lyrical prose that uplifts while not minimizing the loss that is happening around us. Chelsa invites us “into a kind of mothering that is wild and porous. The kind that draws blood, that loves and fears, rejoices and doubts, that exposes where we are most vulnerable and from there stretches us into what is beyond us.”
Golden winged warbler, barn owl, right whale, Canada Geese, forests, and a salt marsh are all our teachers. As Chelsea describes, “ecology is a terrain of both motherhood and justice. The earth is a nurturing, life supporting being who is woefully undervalued and overlooked.”
We, at CHC, are thrilled to have Chelsea come and speak at our Annual Gathering, October 21, 2026. Books will be available for sale at the event. We look forward to seeing you all there; we’re excited to gather with our friends and community who share in the desire to care for the planet and our future.
Learn more & save your spot for the Annual Gathering HERE.
Author Bio:
Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder is the author of MOTHER, CREATURE, KIN: What We Learn from Nature's Mothers in a Time of Unraveling (Broadleaf Books, 2025), and TINY WORLDS: A Field Guide to Small Wonders (Chelsea Green, 2027). She grew up in the Great Plains of Nebraska and Oklahoma. After receiving her masters of theological studies at Harvard Divinity School, her writing became focused on the confluence of relationship to place with experiences of the sacred. She previously worked as a staff writer and editor for Emergence Magazine, an online and print publication exploring the intersection of culture, ecology, and spirituality. Her writing can be found in The Atlantic, Nautilus, Terrain.org, The Common, Decor Maine, From the Ground Up, the edited poetry collection Writing the Land, and in Katie Holten's The Language of Trees: A Rewilding of Literature and Landscape. She works as Executive Director of Vermont Interfaith Power & Light and lives with her family in Rochester, Vermont.