Join us for a discussion of the 2025 One Maryland, One book Kin: Rooted in Hope by Carole Boston Weatherford with art by Jeffrey Boston Weatherford. 

About One Maryland, One Book:
Maryland Humanities is pleased to announce that the selection for the 2025 One Maryland One Book (OMOB) is Kin: Rooted in Hope by Carole Boston Weatherford with art by Jeffery Boston Weatherford. Released in 2024, the book is a work of art, history, and personal genealogy – the authors’ search into their family tree led them to ancestors who were among the founders of Maryland. Through Carole’s poetry and Jeffery’s art, Maryland Humanities will stage programming for readers to explore histories of African Americans, of Maryland, and their own families.

Synopsis: 
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.

About the Author:
The daughter of a printer, Carole Boston Weatherford was practically born with ink in her blood. She began writing at age 6 and soon after saw her poems in print. Her 80-plus books have garnered 2 NAACP Image Awards and 18 American Library Association Youth Media Awards, including a Newbery Honor, Coretta Scott King Award and 4 Caldecott Honors. Her career achievements have been recognized with the North Carolina Award for Literature, the Nonfiction Award from the Children’s Book Guild and induction into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame. A retired English professor, she lives in Maryland.

About the Illustrator: 
Jeffery Boston Weatherford was born with such distinctive hands that his grandmother predicted he would grow up to do important work. She was right! An award-winning illustrator, Jeffery has collaborated with Carole on 3 books. He was a Romare Bearden scholar at Howard University where he earned a Master of Fine Arts degree. Also a performance poet and fine artist, Jeffery has performed or exhibited in the U.S., West Africa and the Middle East. He lives in North Carolina.