Elizabeth Knight is an author and speaker who retired from careers in marketing communications, sales promotion, special events, visual merchandising, and the hospitality industry — including writing books about tea: the plant, drink, meal, and cultural experience. Shortly after moving to the Hudson Valley, she visited a Repair Café held in a nearby town. Impressed by the fix-it skills and kindness that volunteers extended to people clutching torn textiles, wobbly chairs wonky lamps, and dull knives, among other beloved but broken items, she started Orange County, NY’s first Repair Café in 2016. Shocked by the amount of useful goods kicked to the curb for a village’s annual bulk-trash pick-up, in 2017 she started Warwick’s Too Good To Toss, a volunteer-run, free, annual community swap designed to keep useful goods out of a landfill.

John Wackman, founder of New York state’s first Repair Cafe (New Paltz), wrote in the introduction to Repair Revolution-How Fixers Are Transforming Our Throwaway Culture, that he invited Elizabeth to join him as coauthor “…after reading a year’s worth of the follow-up reports she wrote to her volunteers after every Warwick Repair Cafe. The pictures she painted in words captured the spirit and essence of community repair with insight and personality, telling the stories of the people who brought things, and the people who fixed them. John knew that is exactly what this book would need.”

Please read book blurb and endorsements on publisher New World Library’s website: https://www.newworldlibrary.com/Books/ProductDetails/tabid/64/SKU/86605/Default.aspx#.YmGixNrMK3A

If you’d like to order books at wholesale prices to sell at your event, please contact Ami Parkerson, ami@newworldlibrary.com, wholesale accounts manager NWL

Ulster County Women’s Network