Travel the literary road as we visit a favorite poem of a classic American poet, then enjoy the creativity of Frances Kite and Deb Rowden as they translate the verse into a beautiful quilt block.

"As a blanket, a commemorative covering, and a work of art, the quilt is a nearly universal cultural artifact. In recent years it has been recognized as one of our most compelling symbols of cultural diversity and the power of women. In this collection, Cheryl B. Torsney and Judy Elsley bring together eleven provocative essays on the quilt as metaphor--in literature, history, politics, and philosophy. This interdisciplinary approach makes Quilt Culture an extraordinarily rich exploration of a cultural artifact whose meaning is far more complex than that of a simple bed covering."--Publishers website.

"Quilted Poems" was created by an ekphrastic collaboration of poets from the Poetry Society of Virginia, and quilters from Virginia. Ekphrastic is Greek for to "describe or explain". The quilts in this book visually describe poems written to inspire quilters. It contains 65 poems and images of 45 quilts. Some of the quilts were designed as concrete representations of the quilter's chosen poem, others used abstract symbols or abstract quilt block designs. The poems address various subjects including nature, the process of quilting and quilters, and spirituality. This unique book is a wondrous melding of visual and literary art. While each poem and quilt can be viewed and appraised individually, your original perspective is further enhanced or shifted askew when merging the two mediums. This careful pairing of images and words creates an artistic synergy that is a treat to behold. --Bill Glose, author of "Postscript to War", "Virginia Walkabout", "Personal Geography", "Half a Man", and "The Human Touch" All that we piece together from threads and fragments, stories and words-- surely, work that bears the signatures of time and love. We are grateful for the poets and quilters who give us an abundance of such gifts through this anthology. --Luisa A. Igloria, 20th Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth of Virginia

A collection of poems by the author divided into sections: Log Cabin; Catalpa Flower; Eight-pointed Star; Tree of Life; Prayer.

More than thirty stories, plays, poems, and songs featuring the making of quilts—written from 1845 to the present, mainly by American women—document women's literary history. Featuring the work of Bobbie Ann Mason, Joyce Carol Oates, Alice Walker, Sharyn

Pieces of the seasons appear and disappear in a patchwork pattern making up a year.

“One of her best collections to date.” —Essence Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea is a tour de force from Nikki Giovanni, one of the most powerful voices in American poetry and African American literature today. From Black Feeling, Black Talk and Black Judgment in the 1960s to Bicycles in 2010, Giovanni’s poetry has influenced literary figures from James Baldwin to Blackalicious, and touched millions of readers worldwide. In Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea, Giovanni turns her gaze toward the state of the world around her, and offers a daring, resonant look inside her own self as well.

Crafting Feminism develops a dynamic study of craft and art-making in modern and contemporary feminist writing. In evocative readings of literary works from Virginia Woolf to Zadie Smith, this book expands our sense of transartistic modernist scholarship to encompass process-oriented and medium-specific analyses of textile arts, digital design, collage, photography, painting, and sculpture in literary culture. By integrating these craft practices into the book's enlightening archive, Elkins's theoretical argument extends a reading of craft metaphors into the material present. Crafting Feminism demonstrates how writers have engaged with handiwork across generations and have undertaken the crafting of a new modernity, one that is queer and feminist-threaded, messy, shattered, cut-up, pasted together, preserved, repaired, reflected, and spun out. An avant-garde work of scholarship, this book interweaves queer research methods and interdisciplinary rigor with a series of surprising archival discoveries. Making visible the collaborative, creative features of craft, Elkins captivates readers with generous illustrations and a series of "Techne" interchapters-interludes between longer chapters, which powerfully convey the symbiosis between feminist theory and method, and detail the network of archival influences that underpin this volume's hybrid approach. Foregrounding the work of decentering patriarchal and Eurocentric legacies of artistic authority, Elkins champions the diverse, intergenerational history of craft as a way to reposition intersectional makers at the heart of literary culture. An original and compelling study, Crafting Feminism breaks new ground in modernist and visual studies, digital humanities, and feminist, queer, and critical race theory.

A collection of writings which pay tribute to quilts and quilting memories from different eras and authors.

Storied Lives: Emancipatory Educational Inquiry—Experience, Narrative, & Pedagogy in the International Landscape of Diversity contains exemplary research practices, strategies, and findings gleaned from the contributions to the 15 issues of the Journal of Critical Inquiry Into Curriculum and Instruction (JCI~>CI). Founding Editor Tonya Huber initiated the JCI~>CI in 1997, as a refereed journal committed to publishing educational scholarship and research of professionals in graduate study. The journal was distinguished by its requirement that the scholarship be the result of the first author’s graduate research—according to Cabell’s Directory, the first journal to do so. Equally important, the third issue of each volume targeted wide representation of cultures and world regions. “Current thinking on ...” written by members of the JCI~>CI Editorial Advisory Board explores state-of-the-art topics related to curriculum inquiry. Illustrations, photography (e.g., Sebastião Salgado’s Workers in vol. 2), collage, student-generated art/artifacts, and full-color art enhance cutting-edge methodologies extending educational research through Aboriginal and Native oral traditions, arts-based analysis, found poetry, data poetry, narrative, and case study foci on liberatory pedagogy and social justice action research.