In 1866, Malinda Russell published A Domestic Cook Book in Paw Paw, Michigan. As the oldest known cookbook by an African American woman, this slim volume is a landmark in American culinary history. The only known copy resides in the Janice Bluestein Longone Culinary Archive in the U-M Library’s Special Collections Research Center.
Join the U-M Library (Special Collections Research Center and Michigan Publishing) and the Ann Arbor District Library on on Thursday, February 27th at the Downtown Branch of the Ann Arbor District Library (AADL) for a reception and panel discussion celebrating the new edition released by the University of Michigan Press. The reception will begin at 5:15pm, with the conversation to follow at 5:45pm. The panel will be livestreamed on AADL's website.
Panelists:
Dr. Cherene Sherrard-Johnson is a poet, scholar, and essayist. 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 (2012); and two poetry collections, Vixen (2017) and Grimoire (2020). She is the editor of the Cambridge Companion to the Black Body in American Literature. (2024). Recent creative nonfiction and public writing have appeared in Terrain.org, Hidden Compass, Gastro Obscura, History Now, and English Language Notes. She is the E. Wilson Lyon Professor of the Humanities and Chair of the English Department at Pomona College.
Dr. Jessica Kenyatta Walker is an American Studies scholar exploring food and racialization within everyday cultural landscapes. Her research is deeply interdisciplinary, thoughtfully mining the intersections of Black Studies, Critical Food Studies, Black Feminist Theory, and theories of space and place. Dr. Walker’s work draws on cookbooks, USDA archival reports, and popular media like television, culinary magazines, and film to create a rich, textured understanding of how ideologies like domesticity shape our food lives.