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

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.

Bonnie Lee Black is the author of the memoir Somewhere Child (Viking Press, 1981), which was instrumental in the creation of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Her second memoir, about her Peace Corps service in Gabon, How to Cook a Crocodile (Peace Corps Writers, 2010), won a "Best in the World" award from Gourmand Inter-national in March 2012. The manuscript for this Mali book won first place in the memoir-book category in the SouthWest Writers Annual Writing Contest, 2011. Black earned a bachelor of arts degree from Columbia University in New York in 1979 and an MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University-Los Angeles in 2007. She was a professional writer and editor in New York City for twenty years and has been an educator in the U.S. and overseas for nearly twenty years. Her essays have appeared in a number of published anthologies and literary journals. She now lives in Taos, New Mexico, and teaches at UNM-Taos. In 2012 she was chosen one of the Remarkable Women of Taos. Visit her website at www.bonnieleeblack.com.