NEW RELEASE — COMING IN 2024

Stitch Please: When Freedom is Fed with Needle and Thread

Publisher: Row House

Through her roles as an activist for Black liberation, 6th generation sewing enthusiast, community organizer, and university professor, Woolfork presents an insightful exploration of stitching as an ancestral creative medium, life skill, and self-care practice for African American women. With a captivating blend of academic rigor and storytelling, Woolfork gathers the hidden threads of America’s early home sewing industry and needles through the sartorial traditions of Black makers. Drawing inspiration from notable thinkers like Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Ashon Crawley, Christina Sharpe, and Mikhail Bahktin, Woolfork uses sewing as a critical apparatus that yields groundbreaking insights into Black women’s self-presentation, bodily sovereignty, world-building, and ancestral veneration practices.

As the host and producer of Stitch Please, a popular weekly podcast that centers Black women, girls, and femmes in the world of sewing, Woolfork brings her expertise to the forefront. Heard in a staggering 83% of the world’s countries, the podcast has become a powerful platform for showcasing the creativity and resilience of Black women creators in the sewing and quilting communities. In “Stitch Please: When Freedom is Fed with Needle and Thread,” Woolfork combines her knowledge of Black literary and cultural studies with the multifaceted nature of sewing and quilting. With accessible writing that balances humor and critical insights, this book offers practical sewing content, cultural critique, and inspiring examples of Black creatives self-making with needle and thread. 

No matter your background or interests, this engaging work will leave you inspired, informed, and eager to celebrate the profound connections between needle arts and Black liberation.

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ABOUT

A Word From The Author 

My name is Lisa Woolfork and I am a sewist, podcaster, community organizer, and scholar. As a sixth-generation sewing enthusiast, I have long been drawn to the creative and meditative nature of needle arts. However, my passion for sewing and quilting goes beyond the personal satisfaction of creating something beautiful. For me, these practices are a way to honor the legacy of Black women who have used their skills to resist oppression, build vibrant communities, and extend the boundaries of freedom within their own lives.

Through my sewing and quilting practice, I aim to challenge traditional notions of craft and art and to explore the intersections between needle arts and Black liberation. I believe that these practices have the power to create meaningful works of art that can inspire and connect Black people across boundaries of space and time.

My work interrogates the divisions between art and craft, social justice and liberation, and seeks to amplify the voices of Black women, girls, and femmes in the world of sewing. I am interested in the structural elements of stitching as a form of meaning-making and archiving the ephemera of Black aliveness.

Sewing and quilting are powerful tools for rest, resistance and meaning making. As the founder of Black Women Stitch, the sewing group where Black Lives Matter, and the host/producer of Stitch Please, a weekly audio podcast that centers Black women, girls, and femmes in sewing, I am committed to using my practice to foster greater understanding and deeper connection within and among our communities.

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Lisa Woolfork 

Academic / Artist / Activist

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Embodying American Slavery in Contemporary Culture

This study examines contemporary novels, films, performances, and reenactments that use time-travel as a representational strategy to portray American slavery and its lasting impact. By allowing present-day protagonists to witness and engage with traumatic histories, these works challenge the belief that such events are inaccessible and evoke a sense of bodily knowing. Lisa Woolfork argues that these cultural expressions aim to revive the significance of the slave past, bridging the gap between past and present and countering societal indifference towards the trauma of slavery.

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TESTIMONIALS

What Are Readers Saying

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Interrogating contemporary psychoanalytic theories of trauma for their privileging of mind over body, the author argues instead for a bodily epistemology that more accurately captures the historical complexity of slavery. Woolfork revises trauma theory's assumptions of inaccessibility as she interprets contemporary neoslave narratives by artists such as Octavia Butler, Haile Gerima, and Phyllis Alesia Perry, which offer deeply historicized renderings of slavery and its bodies, forcing the reader/observer to witness and participate in the violent, brutal past. Woolfork's book builds on recent work in African American studies and psychoanalytic theory by Cathy Caruth, Claudia Tate, Hortense Spillers, and Saidiya Hartman, challenging and confronting the divides between past and present, freedom and slavery, as they are reenacted bodily and textually in contemporary US culture.
D. E. Magill, University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown 
In her new book, Embodying American Slavery in Contemporary Culture, Lisa Woolfork, an associate professor of English at the University of Virginia, examines the issues raised as workers in American public culture try to explore the experience of slavery. If slavery is for white Americans the original sin, it is for the descendants of slaves the primal American experience, for centuries the galvanizing element of a race. Yet, slavery is still an under-addressed part of American public culture. Unlike the Germans with their Nazi past, we have yet to look slavery fully in the face, but Woolfork examines three popular avenues that are being used to redress the omission: fiction, popular culture, and historical reenactments.
Sheri Parks, Community Strategist, Scholar, and Writer
With great clarity, Lisa Woolfork engages the most sophisticated theoretical ideas about trauma and slavery. This intricate, comprehensive, and inclusive work joins a burgeoning field of studies that directly analyze slavery in contemporary neo-slave narrative.
Helena Woodard, Associate Professor of English, University of Texas
A welcome addition to the African diaspora conversations about slavery, its trauma, and the complications of its remembrance. Woolfork's focus on the bodily epistemology of the slave past as a part of a transnational, multi-racial, multi-generational critique is well conceived and provocative.
Sheila Smith McKoy, author of When Whites Riot: Writing Race and Violence in American and South African Violence
…Woolfork disentangles the theoretical assumptions implicit in various modes of slave tourism, ritual, and edu-tainment. In an arresting description of the Maafa Suite, Woolfork explains that vernacular theory's privileging of the body "as a strategy for knowing the past" may strike the academic as "raw" (150) largely because of that privileging. A similar exoneration obtains for Woolfork's book. There is a rawness to the thick descriptions of ​​Woolfork's object texts, perhaps as an effect of her own vernacular-izing presence (for lack of a better word) during the scene of their witnessing, reading, and viewing. It is, after all, not only in the engaging conclusion – on Dave Chappelle's outtakes, slave skits, and logo as a repetition of the desire to take down slave masters for profit (201) –that Woolfork deals in a participatory form of reenactment.
Michael A. Chaney, Professor of English and American Literature at Dartmouth College

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PODCASTS

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Unveiling Stories: Let’s Talk about Art, Inspiration, and Creativity

Join Lisa Woolfork in her engaging podcast as she delves into the world of art, exploring the intricate threads of inspiration and creativity. Tune in on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, or your preferred platform, and let’s embark on a captivating journey of conversation and discovery. Click below to start listening and let’s talk!

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