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Sarah Baldwin's Cosmic Sister recognition was more than a funded profile: the 2018 Plant Spirit Grant sent her to the Temple of the Way of Light in Peru for an ayahuasca retreat focused specifically on studying Amazonian medicinal plants, a destination and a plant tradition entirely outside the Indiana herbal apprenticeship and Oregon internship that shaped her earlier practice.
Her academic background sits underneath both halves of that career: a Bachelor of Arts in Communication and Culture from Indiana University, a degree in neither botany nor herbal medicine specifically, preceded the Herb Pharm internship and the herbal writing career that followed, positioning The Herbal Healing Deck as the product of a communication and writing background applied to plant medicine rather than of formal botanical or ethnobotanical training.
Baldwin continues to write and teach on herbalism today, describing her own goal in terms distinct from typical author biography language: she says she aspires to become an ambassador for the plants themselves, a framing that treats her writing and teaching as advocacy on behalf of the plants rather than as personal career description, consistent with the same register her Peru journey and her deck both work in, treating medicinal plants as active partners in her work rather than as passive subject matter for her cards and writing to describe from the outside.