Following this year's theme "What We Collect/What We Tell", the Maryland Humanities selection committee has chosen Kin: Rooted in Hope as the 2025 One Maryland One Book!
"What We Collect/What We Tell" is all about exploring how we tell stories, of ourselves and our communities, in different forms: personal memoir, historical research, recent experiences, long-ago past, and in different media. Kin: Rooted in Hope is a powerful portrait of a Black family tree shaped by enslavement and freedom, rendered in searing poems by acclaimed author Carole Boston Weatherford and stunning art by her son Jeffery Boston Weatherford. It is an excellent representation of the many ways stories can be collected, organized, and related to different audiences.
Grab your free copy of Kin: Rooted in Hope at any Ruth Enlow Library location today. Then, join us for a series of book discussions beginning in mid-September. See the full schedule below.
One Maryland One Book Discussion Schedule:
Accident: September 11th | 11:30 AM - 12:30 PM
Grantsville: September 26th | 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Oakland: October 6th | 6:00 - 7:00 PM
Friendsville: October 15th | 4:00 - 5:00 PM
Kitzmiller: October 20th | 6:00 - 7:00 PM
"Carole and Jeffery Boston Weatherford’s ancestors are among the founders of Maryland. Their family history there extends more than three hundred years, but as with the genealogical searches of many African Americans with roots in slavery, their family tree can only be traced back five generations before going dark. And so from scraps of history, Carole and Jeffery have conjured the voices of their kin, creating an often painful but ultimately empowering story of who their people were in a breathtaking book that is at once deeply personal yet all too universal.
Carole’s poems capture voices ranging from her ancestors to Frederick Douglass to Harriet Tubman to the plantation house and land itself that connects them all, and Jeffery’s evocative illustrations help carry the story from the first mention of a forebear listed as property in a 1781 ledger to he and his mother’s homegoing trip to Africa in 2016. Shaped by loss, erasure, and ultimate reclamation, this is the story of not only Carole and Jeffery’s family, but of countless other Black families in America"