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). Exploring the worlds of North Atlantic right whales, tidal salt marshes, barn owls, and strange, single-celled organisms, she asks what it means to be a mother in an era of climate catastrophe, and considers what we can learn from the plants and creatures who mother at the edges of their world’s unraveling. Chelsea 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. From 2017-2022, she worked as a staff writer and editor for
Emergence Magazine, an award-winning online and print publication exploring the intersection of culture, ecology, and spirituality. Her work has also been featured in The Common, The Slowdown, Crannóg Magazine, Inhabiting the Anthropocene, EcoTheo Review, 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 lives in Rochester, Vermont, with her husband, Andrew, and their daughter, Aspen.
