Love Letters to Vertamae
Celebrating the Life & Legacy of Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor
- April 07, 2021 -
Vertamae tells us,
“you cant eat with everybody. you got to have the right vibrations.”
In Our Mothers’ Kitchens, we certainly got the right vibrations!
Accompanied and encouraged by Vertamae’s daughters and grandchildren, OMK gathered around the virtual table with artists Therese Nelson, Yolanda Wisher and Gabrielle E.W. Carter to celebrate the life and legacy of our mama, culinary anthropologist Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor.
In recent years, author of “Vibration Cooking, or Travel Notes of a Geechee Girl”, Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor has been introduced to a new generation of readers, cooks and eaters and crowned the “unsung godmother of American food writing”. In her own words, she be “a cosmic force. / culinary griot. / mother to two sagittarian daughters.” We call her our first foremother, our sweet “GRAND mother”. The inspiration for Our Mothers’ Kitchens.
She be the seed.
On Wednesday April 7, 2021 we celebrated with our community, honoring and praising “happy birthday” to our dear foremother, Vertamae.
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Panelists:
Therese Nelson is a chef, writer, and the founder of BlackCulinaryHistory.com a social network and digital safe space for the exploration of African Atlantic foodways.
Philadelphia-based poet, singer, educator and curator Yolanda Wisher is the author of Monk Eats an Afro and the co-editor with Sonia Sanchez of the anthology Peace is a Haiku Song. Wisher was named the inaugural Poet Laureate of Montgomery County, Pennsylvania in 1999 and the third Poet Laureate of Philadelphia for 2016-2017. A Pew and Cave Canem Fellow, Wisher was awarded the Leeway Foundation's Transformation Award in 2019 for her commitment to art for social change. Wisher taught high school English for a decade, served as Director of Art Education for Philadelphia Mural Arts, and founded and directed the Germantown Poetry and Outbound Poetry Festivals. She performs a unique blend of poetry and song with her band The Afroeaters and has led workshops and curated events in partnership with the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Free Library of Philadelphia, and the U.S. Department of Arts & Culture. Wisher was part of the first cohort of artists with studios at the Cherry Street Pier on the Delaware River Waterfront. She is currently the Curator of Spoken Word and producer of the podcast Love Jawns: A Mixtape at Philadelphia Contemporary, a freestanding space for contemporary and performance art.
Gabrielle E. W. Carter is an Artist and Cultural Preservationist who uses Diasporic and local food as a vehicle to reimagine wealth, marginalized food systems, and inheritance. Her work uses oral history, cooking, and film to examine and explore the Black experience in relation to land cultivation, traditional practices, and agronomy. Creating contemporary source materials and points of access.
In 2020 she debuted her latest work at the Culinary Institute of America’s annual conference Worlds of Flavor. She was recently named a 12 under 35 breakout talent to watch by Specialty Food Magazine. Her storytelling has been featured in Saveur Magazine, Smithsonian Food Weekend '20, The Kitchn, and Whetstone Magazine's podcast Point of Origin. She also co-founded the North Carolina based Black Farmer CSA, Tall Grass Food Box, a platform to support and encourage the sustainability of Black farmers, by increasing their visibility and securing space for them in the local marketplace.