I’d like to thank the Boston Globe–Horn Book Awards Committee for this honor. Thanks also to Reka Simonsen, my editor at Simon & Schuster, for your faith in bringing this project to life. Last but not least, I am indebted to my agent, Rubin Pfeffer, for planting the seed for a mother-son collaboration when he inquired about a Black town that might inspire a poetry collection similar to Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology. The resulting verse novel and family history, Kin: Rooted in Hope, pairs my multi-voiced poems with Jeffery Boston Weatherford’s digital scratchboard art. Kin is not only the book of my heart but also of my heritage.

Collaborating on Kin with my son was a gift for me. I appreciate the passion Jeffery poured into art that he says “literally brings our ancestors out of the darkness and into the light.” Scholars, journalists, and creatives must continue to shed light on enslavement, however shameful the saga.

[Read Horn Book reviews of the 2024 BGHB Nonfiction and Poetry winners.]

According to DocSouth, the University of North Carolina’s online archive, of the more than ten million African descendants once enslaved in the Americas, only 204 published their memoirs. That immeasurable loss sent me and Jeffery on a quest from Maryland’s Eastern Shore to West Africa for family lineage and lost narratives. With a sense of reverence and responsibility, we conjured the voices, visages, and vistas of our ancestors and their contemporaries, Black and white. Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Frances Scott Key, and even inanimate objects such as a slave ship, the Great House, mirrors, and clocks all have their say. Kin is set at Wye House, once Maryland’s largest enslavement plantation, and in nearby Unionville and Copperville, communities co-founded by our ancestors and other freedmen during Reconstruction.

I believe that Jeffery and I were destined for this quest. During childhood visits to our century farm in Copperville, we soaked up history, lore, and land memory. Long before conceiving Kin, I was intrigued by a passage from Frederick Douglass’s autobiography about a Doctor or Minister Isaac Copper, who I suspected was my forefather. Our research consulted plantation ledgers, military records, ship manifests, contemporaneous accounts, archeological finds, material culture, the landscape, and local lore. We found that Isaac Copper was our earliest known ancestor.

While many Black genealogists hit a brick wall at 1870, the first census that counted Black Americans as individuals rather than property, Jeffery and I traced our roots to 1770 in colonial America. Ultimately, we resorted to critical fabulation to push past the limits of the archive — merging fact with speculation to restore what enslavement robbed.

Though unable to pinpoint our African origins, we came across local lore that we descend from African royalty. Kin rightly places our ancestors among Maryland’s founding families and conveys a rich legacy that many African Americans share.

This I know for sure: names, dates, and places form the roots and branches of a family tree, but stories are the leaves. Knowing your history is generational wealth.

From the January/February 2025 issue of The Horn Book Magazine. For more on the 2024 Boston Globe–Horn Book Awards, click on the tag BGHB24. Read more from The Horn Book by and about Carole Boston Weatherford.