Sewing Stories : Harriet Powers' Journey from Slave to Artist

Harriet Powers learned to sew and quilt as a young girl on a Georgia plantation, where female slaves produced textiles for the master's house. She lived through the Civil War and Reconstruction, and eventually owned a cotton farm with her family, all the while using her skills with the needle to clothe and feed her children. Later, she honed the skills she had learned as a child and began making pictorial quilts, using each square to illustrate Bible stories and local legends.

She first began exhibiting her quilts at a cotton fair in Georgia and though she never traveled outside of Georgia, her surviving quilts are now priceless examples of African-American folk art. Of the two quilts that are known to have survived, one hangs in the Smithsonian and the other in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Barbara Herkert's musical narrative and Vanessa Newton's eye-catching illustrations bring this important artist to life in this moving picture book biography.