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The Goddess
of Gumbo
Standing on Sacred Ground
The Goddess of Gumbo is about being grounded–in landscapes of trauma and also made sacred by trauma
View →Talking * Books
Telling Southern Stories
For example in my NEW book!
Romancing the Gullah in the Age
of Porgy and Bess
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Snacking in the Creole Kitchen
“Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food”? The Global South kitchen has a balm for what ails you
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Photo: Detail from “Water/Table,” Evoking History Artist’s Collective, Spoleto Festival USA, 2004. Curated by Mary Jane Jacob with a collaborative artists’ team composed of Kendra Hamilton, Walter Hood, Ernesto Pujol, and Frances Whitehead, the installation consisted of 3,300 Carolina Gold rice plants creating a temporary wetland in the center of the city and setting the table for provocative conversations about the city’s history and its present amid rising seas.
My Passion:
documenting
405 Years of Creole adaptation and innovation
The Goddess of Gumbo is about stories, and the subject is my South–the creole South that is the product of the tres sangres, the three ancestral bloodlines (Native, African, and European) converging into a mighty river. We’ll cast our rafts on this river, exploring art, music, gardens, cooking, and having conversations with people living and dead on the journey.
Read my book!
You’ll learn that eating rice is an African “survival”–and a whole lot more–here…
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The unforgetting land
The coasts where I grew up still bear scars from rice cultivation. Here I explore cultural maps of landscapes of trauma and the ways in which we heal in them–and sometimes in spite of them.
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The traveling flavors
The tres sangres left a bread pudding trail through all the lands where they met and mingled. Here I explore a few of the ways feeding and being fed have been critical to our surviving and thriving.
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The sacred earth
This Southern bloom is so common that many think it’s native, but, like so much in the South, its Mother Continent is Africa and its meaning is complex, just like our creole spirituality.
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Meet the Goddess
Kendra Hamilton, PhD, crafts and curates works that trouble the waters of common understandings of rural Southern lives on both sides of the color line. Widely published as a scholar, essayist, and poet, she teaches literature and interdisciplinary studies and is the author of Romancing the Gullah in the Age of Porgy and Bess (2024) andThe Goddess of Gumbo: Poems (2006).
the bitter tears are stone / but one quick breath remembers love / and the long years you’ve lain / bride to the thunder / sister to the fallen rain…
— Audre Lorde