A Language of Stitches: The Radical Quilts of Rosie Lee Tompkins

Gr 2-5–To let Moore (Black: The Many Wonders of My World) tell it, “Effie Mae Martin, known as Rosie Lee Tompkins, became one of the most important American artists to ever live. Effie invented her art from needle, thread, and stitch. She turned ordinary cloth into extraordinary art.” Moore’s book isn’t a conventional biography so much as a journey through one Black woman’s mental health recovery through the language of sewing, stitchwork, and color. Born to a sharecropping family in Arkansas in 1936, Effie was a quiet woman who dealt with mental illness. Recalling the sewing skills she’d been taught as a young girl, she stitched her way to recovery, quilt by quilt and pattern by pattern. Through her work, Effie, who changed her name to Rosie Lee Tompkins for privacy, detailed stories about Black life in the United States and her faith, among a wide range of topics. She adapted classic quilt patterns—sawtooth, nine patch, log cabin, flying geese—to create her own new designs, in which “triangles tilt, squares rise, and circles turn.” Moore’s illustrations in this book take all that is charming about quilting and its myriad patterns and pull readers into the pages to find out more.