Katherine Kassouf Cummings

Katherine serves as Managing Editor for the Center, where she also co-edits Humans and Nature Press, Digital. Since 2012, Katherine has led the Questions for a Resilient Future publication series, for which she developed the Editorial Fellows program in 2019. She received her BA from Emory University in anthropology with minors in environmental studies and global health, culture, and society. Before joining the Center, Katherine worked for Yale University’s Human Relations Area Files. She holds an editing certificate from the University of Chicago.

Katherine believes that words are one of the most basic elements of worldview. Her work as Managing Editor is guided by attention to the ethics of editing at every stage of the publication process. As part of the Center’s Editorial Fellows program, she has collaborated with Julian Brave Noisecat, Christine Luckasavitch, Manòn Voice, Kate Weiner, and Kailea Loften. She is co-editor of What Kind of Ancestor Do You Want to Be? (University of Chicago Press, 2021). In her own writings, Katherine attends to embodiment as a pathway for discovery, interconnection, and compassion; she is also interested in the history and ongoing transformation of language. Her collaborative work with artist Colleen Plumb was exhibited at Chicago’s Edelman Gallery and the Riverside Art Center and published in Orion Magazine. When not at her desk, Katherine shares her passion for somatics and women’s health as a movement instructor.

CONTRIBUTIONS TO HUMANS & NATURE:

• Enter with Curiosity: Tending Connection through a Practice of Questions
• Ten Years of Questions: Reflections from the Co-founders of Questions for a Resilient Future
• When We Listen: A Conversation with Christine Luckasavitch and Alyssa Bardy
• Poems as Portals
• You Belong to the Land: A Conversation with Karen Washington and Leah Penniman
• Valuing Vulnerability: A Review of Phoenix Zones by Hope Ferdowsian
• Time to Love
• Homecoming
• 6 a.m. on LaSalle Street
• Life between the Buildings
• City Along a Flyway
  

NOTEWORTHY LINKS:

• Invisible Visible
  Read Katherine’s writing at Orion Magazine.
• What Kind of Ancestor Do You Want to Be?
  A book co-edited by John Hausdoerffer, Brooke Parry Hecht, Melissa K. Nelson, and Katherine Kassouf Cummings
• Slow Food: Author Readings
  Listen to Katherine present as part of a panel discussion about women and seeds.

Photo credit: Katherine Kassouf Cummings