About us

Toolkit Co-founders & Book Editors

Jennifer Atkinson, PhD, is an Associate Professor of environmental humanities at the University of Washington, Bothell and co-editor of The Existential Toolkit for Climate Justice Educators. Her seminars on Eco-Grief & Climate Anxiety have been featured in the New York Times, National Geographic, Washington Post Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, Seattle Times, and many other outlets. She leads public seminars and workshops on climate anxiety across North American to help people channel despair into action. Her podcast Facing It also provides tools to navigate eco-anxiety and other difficult emotions. Dr. Atkinson is also the author of Gardenland: Nature, Fantasy and Everyday Practice, a book that explores garden literature as a "fantasy genre" where people enact desires for social justice, joyful labor, and contact with nature. Her writing on the history of gardening in hard times has been featured on programs like NPR, The Conversation, and Earth Island Journal. Dr. Atkinson holds a PhD in English Literature from the University of Chicago, and lives in Seattle where she’s taught at the University of Washington since 2009.

Toolkit Co-founder & Filmmaker

Elin Kelsey, PhD is an award-winning author, speaker and thought-leader for the evidence-based hope and climate justice solutions movement. Kelsey’s influence can be seen through the popularity of her book, Hope Matters: Why Changing the Way We Think Is Critical For Solving The Environmental Crisis (2020) and in the hopeful, solutions-focus of her clients, including the Monterey Bay Aquarium, and other powerful institutions where she has served as a visiting fellow including the Rachel Carson Center for the Environment and Society, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Kone Foundation, the Salish Sea Institute, the Cairns Institute and Stanford University. She co-created the viral social media campaign #OceanOptimism and is currently leading intergenerational collaborations with climate influencers to make evidence-based hope more shareable online. She is an Adjunct Faculty member of the University of Victoria School of Environmental Studies, and Western Washington University’s School of Environment. She regularly serves as an author/artist in residence for international schools. She is a best-selling children's book author, podcast host, and film writer.  For more, please visit https://www.elinkelsey.org. 

Sarah Jaquette Ray, PhD, is a leading researcher and educator in climate anxiety and climate justice, and co-editor of The Existential Toolkit for Climate Justice Educators. Dr. Ray is Chair of the Environmental Studies Department at Cal Poly Humboldt . Her second book, A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety: How to Keep Your Cool on a Warming Planet is a practical toolkit for the climate generation. Her first book, The Ecological Other: Environmental Exclusion in American Culture explores the ways that environmental discourse often reinforces existing social hierarchies, drawing on a legacy of nativist, racial, and ableist exclusion in environmental history. Dr. Ray has also edited three collections, including Critical Norths: Space, Nature, Theory, Disability Studies & the Environmental Humanities: Toward an Eco-Crip Theory, and Latinx Environmentalisms: Place, Justice, and the Decolonial. She received her PhD in Environmental Sciences, Studies, and Policy, with a focal department of English, at the University of Oregon in 2009. She holds a BA in Religious Studies (Swarthmore College) and a MA in American Studies (UT-Austin).

Toolkit Curator

Trang Dang holds a PhD in Arts and Humanities from Nottingham Trent University and previously graduated from Oxford Brookes University with a BA and an MA in English Literature. She currently works as a Communications Coordinator for the Climate Psychology Alliance UK. Her PhD project focuses on Jeff VanderMeer’s eco weird fiction, exploring narratives of dark ecology and co-existence between humans and nonhumans through the lenses of object-oriented philosophy and the Anthropocene discourse. She has published on the topics of animal studies, American contemporary culture, and contemporary critical theory on the Anthropocene. For more, please visit her academic website here and art website here.