Kin Folk Archive x Public Library Quilts x The Salt Eaters Bookshop
A collaboration about books & Black women’s kinship culminating in a quilt raffle in Spring 2024.
Ashley, Jess, & Asha believe books build kinship.
Ashley curates the work of Black women writers for children’s story circles. Jess makes quilts for community. & Asha runs a local bookstore. Together they are selling book bundles through The Salt Eaters & raising funds for the Kin Folk Archive through a quilt raffle in Spring 2024.
Join us across the summer as we share the process of making a signature quilt centring the names of Black women writers for children attending future Lil’ Free Bird story circles at Black-owned bookstores, forest schools, and community spaces. Win your own PLQ quilt in Spring.
Kin Folk Archive: Lil’ Free Bird Book Bundles
The Lil’ Free Bird Library orients Black children and their families toward the rich canon of children’s literature authored by Black women writers. Inspired by the Black women’s writers renaissance of the 1970’s and the informal networks of writers who gathered in sisterhood, Ashley’s collection is composed of vintage books deacquisitioned by public libraries authored by the Black writers and poets of this era.
Ashley shares these books through Lil’ Free Bird story and song circles in Black owned bookshops and through her own forest gatherings with Black children and their kin. This work is embedded within Ashley’s Kin Folk Archive, a project pointing to the networks of kinship across generations of Black women writers. This work is grounded in the stories and memories that nourish Black childhood world making, past and present. Add Ashley’s curated book bundles to your own family, community, or library through curated bundles for sale through Asha’s bookstore, The Salt Eaters.
The Kin Folk Archive Quilt: a signature quilt for kinship
Quilts define physical spaces of community and intergenerational kinship. As our Kin Folk Archive Quilt is spread on the floor of bookshops and libraries, children will be invited to gather on its welcoming surface. They will learn the names of Black women writers shared through Ashley’s Lil’ Free Bird story circles and find these embroidered names on our quilt.
Signature and friendship quilts have long been used by quilters to embed communities into the surface of a quilt, sometimes archiving the members of a family or the donors who gave to a social justice cause. Our quilt builds on this rich signature quilt tradition, enlisting the help of eight talented embroiderers - Tenille, Sharbroen, Judit, Lisa, Esther, Sarah, Leya, & Tabara - to help teach children the names of Black women writers.
The Black women writers honoured on the Kin Folk Archive Quilt
Zora Neale Hurston, Bessie Jones, Gwendolyn Brooks, Mari Evans, Maya Angelou, Eloise Greenfield, Faith Ringgold, Toni Morrison, Virginia Hamilton, Sonia Sanchez, Lucille Clifton, June Jordan, Toni Cade Bambara, Nikki Giovanni, Ntozake Shange, & Kali Grosvenor
Faith Ringgold reads her book Tar Beach, 1991
Listen to the matriarch of quilting, Faith Ringgold read one of her children’s books. Faith is honoured on our signature quilt & her books feature in Ashley’s Lil’ Free Bird story circles.
June Jordon, Maya Angelou, & Lucille Clifton with family.