The Goddess of Gumbo — it’s the title of my first poetry collection but, more importantly, it’s become the avatar of the hospitality, inclusion, diversity, and cultural exchange that inspirits everything I do.

For nearly 20 years now, I’ve been following a call to live against the grain of our tech-obsessed culture and root myself ever more deeply in connection with the land. Through many twists and turns of fate, that quest has led me full circle back to rural South Carolina. Indeed, we now live less than thirty miles from the farm my forefathers purchased “when peace declare,’” i.e., during Reconstruction. (And yes, it’s still in the family.)

From the four-acre farmette my husband and I (and a small army of men with backhoes and heavy equipment) have carved from deep, piney woods, I’m writing, teaching, and organizing around issues of food security and food sovereignty, both in my professional role as an academic and as part of a collective of neighbors and found family gardenin community in in a blighted former “mill hill.”

Come for the food and flowers—stay for the ecofeminist takes the world we want to create.

—Kendra Hamilton, Ph.D.