Karen Babine is the award-winning author of All the Wild Hungers: A Season of Cooking and Cancer (Milkweed Editions, 2019) and Water and What We Know: Following the Roots of a Northern Life (University of Minnesota, 2015), both winners of the Minnesota Book Award for memoir/creative nonfiction. All the Wild Hungers chronicles her mother's rare cancer, Babine's attempt to cook for her mother, and the food metaphors of cancer, all the while collecting vintage cast iron from thrift stores. It is described by James Beard Award-winning chef and writer Amy Thielen as "A lush gem of a book, both heartbreaking and heart-making. Karen Babine’s language is the plush dough she kneads, her observations as elastic as gluten bubbles. By the book’s conclusion you will become a child again, standing on a chair to peer into the pot, not wanting the process of making―of cooking, of understanding, of as she says, ‘consuming the knowing’―to ever end.” Her next book, Acadie: A Family Ecology, about camping to Nova Scotia to discover her family’s Acadian roots, is forthcoming from Milkweed Editions in 2022. She lives in Chattanooga and teaches creative writing at the University of Tennessee-Chattanooga.