Chérie Rivers

Chérie Rivers is a writer, teacher, Black farmer, and mother. She is founder and co-director of Dandelions’, an educational biodynamic farm and earth-based school that integrates the legacy of freedom farming with Black and indigenous earth practices. The aim of this farm and school is to cultivate a just relationship with the natural world by growing knowledge, health, community, and ritual, as well as food. To that end, Dandelions’ offers courses, internships, and other forms of guided land-based learning.

The book that brought her to Mesa, Sustenance, is a cross-pollination between her work as teacher, farmer, and mother. In the context of escalating ecological challenges, it pursues two deceptively simple questions: what do we actually want to sustain? And what actually sustains us? By way of answer, Sustenance integrates stories from her land-based courses with practical strategies for cultivating more reciprocal relationships with the earth.

In her spare time, Chérie is also a professor of Geography and Environment at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. There she teaches courses—including Freedom Farming, Beyond Sustainability, Agroecology and Ecoliteracy, and Liberation Geographies—that invite students to learn with their hands in the earth. She has published books and articles on these topics, most recently To Be Nsala’s Daughter: Decomposing the Colonial Gaze (2023) and “Of Clay and Wonder” (2022).

Chérie is a Marion Weber Healing Arts Fellow.