Kari grew up western Montana, where a childhood of examining interesting rocks in the borrow ditch, watching clouds change over the mountains, and collecting huckleberries with her family instilled a sense of love for and responsibility to the more than human world. Her simultaneous interest in art and human expression led her to study environmental literature at Middlebury College and fiction writing at the University of Wyoming. Between her stints in the classroom as a student and writing instructor, she has worked as a naturalist guide, wilderness ranger, and environmental educator in the Northern Rockies, Utah’s canyon country, and Chilean Patagonia. She approaches writing and teaching the way she approaches wilderness travel: as gentle invitation, reciprocal to place, an inquiry into self. Her current creative projects explore degrowth economics, as well as human-environment relationships in landscapes and communities that have been influenced by settler colonialism. She lives in Anchorage, Alaska, where she leads writing- and art-based backpacking trips with her partner.