Additional information
by Cherene Sherrard (Author)
Named after a magical book, Cherene Sherrard's Grimoire is a poetry collection centered on the recovery and preservation of ancestral knowledge and the exploration of black motherhood.
Incorporating experiences of food preparation, childrearing, and childbearing, the book begins with a section of poems that re-imagine recipes from one of the earliest cookbooks by an African-American woman: Mrs. Malinda Russell's A Domestic Cookbook. Mrs. Russell's voice as a nineteenth-century chef is joined in conversation with a contemporary amateur cook in poetic recipes that take the form of soft and formal sonnets, introspective and historical lyric, and found poems. In the second section, the poet explores black maternal death and the harrowing circumstances surrounding birth for women of color in the United States. Throughout Grimoire, Sherrard explores the precarity of black mothering over the last two centuries and the creative and ingenious modes of human survival.Listed as a "New & Noteworthy" Poetry Collection by the New York Times and named by New York Public Library as one of 2020's "Best Books for Adults," Grimoire is a stunning sophomore collection not to be missed.
Author Biography
Originally from Los Angeles, Cherene Sherrard is a poet, scholar, and essayist. She is the Sally Mead Hands-Bascom Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her creative writing and research explore the nuanced and multifaceted aspects of black life in the diaspora. She is the author of Portraits of the New Negro Woman: Visual and Literary Culture in the Harlem Renaissance (2007), Dorothy West's Paradise: A Biography of Class and Color (2011) and the editor of a Companion to the Harlem Renaissance. Her debut poetry collection, Vixen, was published in 2017 and her chapbook, Mistress, Reclining was the winner of the New Women's Voice Award from Finishing Line Press. She has been the recipient of numerous awards including a Wisconsin Arts Board Grant and poetry fellowships to Ragdale and Sewanee Writer's Conference.
