Karen Babine’s debut essay collection, Water and What We Know: Following the Roots of a Northern Life, is available now from the University of Minnesota Press. Her work has appeared in Ascent, River Teeth, North Dakota Quarterly, Weber: The Contemporary West, Fugue, Sycamore Review, and was listed as a Notable in the 2014 Best American Essays. She is the editor of Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies. She is currently assistant professor of English at Concordia College-Moorhead.