Hannah Rivers is a hippo woman standing a little over six and a half feet tall, with a broad, powerful build and the sort of calm presence that makes people instinctively assume she knows what's going on. Fortunately, she usually does.

Hannah works as a project coordinator for an environmental consulting firm, where she spends her days keeping field crews, clients, regulators, schedules, budgets, and several mutually incompatible definitions of “urgent” moving in roughly the same direction. She's organized without being rigid and patient without being a pushover, with a talent for reducing complicated problems to the next sensible thing that needs doing. When a project begins unraveling, Hannah rarely raises her voice. She opens her notebook.

Outside work, she's much less interested in schedules. Hannah reads, knits, drinks heroic quantities of tea, and loves being outdoors. She rides a fatbike, spends summer weekends sailing whenever she can, and is perfectly happy losing an afternoon at the beach. She's physically strong and surprisingly adventurous, although her preferred adventures tend to involve good preparation, appropriate clothing, and somebody remembering where the car keys are.

Hannah hasn't always had an uncomplicated relationship with her size. Being visibly bigger than most people made it easy to absorb the idea that occupying less space would somehow constitute self-improvement, and for years she periodically found herself chasing arbitrary numbers that had little to do with how healthy or capable she actually was. She's gotten better at recognizing the difference. These days she's much more interested in whether her body lets her cycle farther, haul a sail in rough weather, sleep well, and feel good than whether it satisfies somebody else's idea of what it ought to look like.

Calm, warm, and equipped with a wonderfully dry sense of humor, Hannah is often the steady one in a group. That doesn't mean she's endlessly patient. There is a particular expression she develops when someone has ignored three emails, missed a deadline, and arrived at a meeting asking why nobody told them about it. Her coworkers have learned to fear this expression.

Hannah herself insists she's perfectly pleasant.

She has the meeting minutes to prove it.