Shivon Pearl Love

Shivon Pearl Love is a kitchen poet, educator, and co-founder of Our Mothers’ Kitchens, a Culinary and Literature project centering Black foodways and literary traditions. Focusing on Black women, their bodies and creative outputs, she uses literature to investigate the ways in which Black women employ food and language as a means of preserving themselves, their communities and culture. She has been awarded fellowships and residencies from A Blade of Grass, the Alliance of Artist Communities, and SPACE on Ryder Farm. 

Shivon Pearl Love  will attend the Collegium for African American Research’s 13th Biennial Conference, titled With Harp and Sword: Navigating and Resisting the Second Nadir in Orlando, FL in late January 2019. The conference is being held in conjunction with Eatonville, Florida’s Zora! Festival celebrating Zora Neale Hurston’s cultural and literary contributions to her hometown and abroad. Shivon’s work with collaborator Khaliah Pitts on Our Mothers’ Kitchens centers the work of four African American women writers and their foodways, of which Hurston is one. Attending the conference would serve as an opportunity to learn from historians, scholars, educators, and writers who have immersed themselves in Hurston’s work, including the only living member of OMK’s focus, Alice Walker, who will herself be in attendance at this conference.

Shivon Pearl Love and Khaliah D. Pitts will organize Our Mother’s Kitchens, using the works of Vertamae Smart-Grosvernor, Ntozake Shange, Zora Neale Hurston and Alice Walker to introduce young women of color to the ways in which the authors intersect food and language as a means of expression and cultural preservation. Continuing the use of traditions from the African diaspora, where art and life are one, this 3-day culinary and literature workshop will provide the young women of color participants with vital steps towards building optimal health, self-awareness and cultural connection through the ritual and art of cooking and storytelling.