About the 2025 One Maryland One Book

Hybrid in form, and even more expansive in what it has to say, Kin: Rooted in Hope is a book created by, and about, a Black family and its generations.

Poet and children’s author Carole Boston Weatherford and her son, artist Jeffery Boston Weatherford, collaborated on this book that gives voice to their earliest enslaved ancestors back to the founding of Maryland. With each poem and its accompanying illustration, Carole and Jeffery tell their family story through each of their kin and the world they lived in: the Chesapeake Bay, the plantation house, Frederick Douglass, Harriett Tubman, and more. The selection committee was enthralled by how Kin uses art and poetry to illuminate what can’t be said by historical records (when they are available), in a vital story that is about Maryland’s past and its present.

“Kin: Rooted in Hope is a family affair, a mother-son collaboration on a family saga dating back to colonial Maryland. Our genealogical quest led us to 1770, to Frederick Douglass, to Civil War battlefields, to villages founded by freedmen and to lore hinting at royal roots. With poetry and art, Kin conjures the past, reclaims lost ancestral narratives and brings us to the realization that knowing your history is generational wealth. As a Marylander, I am so proud that Kin‘s selection as the 2025 One Maryland One Book will further amplify our ancestors’ long-marginalized voices. Their story of bondage and freedom—a history shared by many African Americans—is the American story.”

Carole Boston Weatherford

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.

Author photo credit: Gerald Young

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.

Author photo credit: Gerald Young

1. The Yellow House by Sarah M. Broom
2. Mott Street by Ava Chin
3. Everything I Learned, I Learned in a Chinese Restaurant by Curtis Chin
4. Tremor, by Teju Cole
5. Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden by Camille Dungey
6. Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum by Antonia Hylton
7. Wandering in Strangelands by Morgan Jerkins
8. The Collectors: Stories edited by A.S. King
9. Slow Noodles by Chantha Nguon and Kim Green
10. Kin: Rooted in Hope by Carole Boston Weatherford

Our 2025 theme is: What We Collect, What We Tell

“Every generation confronts the task of choosing its past. Inheritances are chosen as much as they are passed on. The past depends less on ‘what happened then’ than on the desires and discontents of the present. Strivings and failures shape the stories we tell.” – Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route.

The humanities are fundamentally an art of narrative—a complex tapestry of storytelling and recordkeeping. Whether expressed through pictures, recordings, paintings, or diaries, these materials help us interpret and reinterpret the past. In other words, they serve as a testament to what we value. The same goes for literature where writers perform acts of cultural preservation through stories they’ve taken from the research and ephemera of past lives and present them to their audiences.

As a humanities organization, we see our work as interpreting and re-interpreting materials from the past for audiences today. A book is the result of a writer choosing which stories to put forward from the experiences, research, and ephemera of the past: the diary, the photo, the recording, the heirloom. The same goes for the museum exhibit, the art show, or the conversations we have around it. In the end, what we record and save is the testament to what we value.

For this year’s One Maryland One Book, we want you to think about how we collect and use materials in order to tell and preserve the stories they hold — especially those in danger of being lost. How do we assemble them into new narratives that speak to today’s audiences?

Each fall, Maryland Humanities sends out a call for suggestions to the general public, educators, librarians, schools, book clubs, and other partners. The call for suggestions is based on an annual theme and pre-determined criteria. Maryland Humanities staff researches all suggestions to make sure they fit the established criteria. Then the selection committee takes the lead, narrowing the list of potential choices to a short list for review.

Announcements:

• Top Ten – January 2025
• Top Three – February 2025
• Final Pick – March 2025

Our 2024 OMOB selection was What Storm, What Thunder by Myriam J. A. Chancy.

At the end of a long, sweltering day, an earthquake of 7.0 magnitude shakes the capital of Haiti, Port-au-Prince. Award-winning author Myriam J. A. Chancy masterfully charts the inner lives of the characters affected by the disaster—Richard, an expat and wealthy water-bottling executive with a secret daughter; the daughter, Anne, an architect who drafts affordable housing structures for a global NGO; a small-time drug trafficker, Leopold, who pines for a beautiful call girl; Sonia and her business partner, Dieudonné, who are followed by a man they believe is the vodou spirit of death; Didier, an emigrant musician who drives a taxi in Boston; Sara, a mother haunted by the ghosts of her children in an IDP camp; her husband, Olivier, an accountant forced to abandon the wife he loves; their son, Jonas, who haunts them both; and Ma Lou, the old woman selling produce in the market who remembers them all.

Brilliantly crafted, fiercely imagined, and deeply haunting, What Storm, What Thunder is a singular, stunning record, a reckoning of the heartbreaking trauma of disaster, and—at the same time—an unforgettable testimony to the tenacity of the human spirit.