How do we sew together the hoped-for future and the unfortunate past, the bright as well as the darker patches of our lives? How do we stitch cultural differences, join disparate worlds, to create something both beautiful and useful? Bonnie Lee Black subtly addresses these universal questions through vivid stories of her life-changing experience living and working in the fabled city of Segou, Mali, in West Africa. At the request of a talented group of Malian seamstresses, Black taught them the craft of American patchwork quilting and spearheaded an economic development effort called the Patchwork Project. She has now created a many-layered patchwork quilt of a book that brings that time and place and all its colorful characters to life on the page. Threaded throughout is the fictional narrative of Jeneba, a slave-quilter in the antebellum American South who had been kidnapped from the Kingdom of Segou as a child, as well as the real voices of the Malian women who took part in the Patchwork Project.

How To Make An African Quilt: The Story of the Patchwork Project of Segou, Mali

Biographies & Memoirs

Black, Bonnie Lee

Community & Culture

Nighthawk Press

A memoir of how a mother lived through the kidnapping ofher daughter by her ex-husband, her search for her child, and how she found strength to continue her life.

Somewhere Child

Viking Adult

"Of all the things I've loved to cook and to bake over the years, making sweet tarts for loved ones and special occasions has topped this list." This cookbook is a compilation of some of the author's favorite, tried-and-true tart recipes, along with related stories, drawn from her twenty-year culinary career. She hopes that Sweet Tarts will inspire readers to make one or two-- or mote!--of these recipes from time to time to enjoy with their own sweethearts.

Sweet Tarts for my Sweethearts: Stories & Recipes from a Culinary Career

Cookbooks, Food & Wine

Baking

Casting caution to the wind at the age of fifty, New York caterer and food writer Bonnie Lee Black decided to close her catering business and join the Peace Corps. Posted to the tiny town of Lastoursville in the thickly rainforested interior of Gabon, Central Africa, Bonnie taught health, nutrition, and cooking, in French, primarily to local African women and children. In the two years she served in Gabon, Bonnie developed her own healthy recipe for a purposeful life, made in equal measures of good food, safe shelter, meaningful work, and unexpected love. Like M.F.K. Fisher's classic, World War II-era book, How to Cook a Wolf, Bonnie's true stories comprise a lively, literary, present-day survival guide.

How to Cook a Crocodile: A Memoir with Recipes

Scott, BarBara

Professionals & Academics

Peace Corps Writers

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Books by Black, Bonnie Lee