Stand in My Window: Meditations on Home and How We Make It

Through essays with stunning photography, the beloved multimedia storyteller and author of Woman of Color shares the powerful lessons she’s learned about creating a home that honors the past and celebrates the future.

“[A] hybrid memoir, featuring beautiful images . . . [Yvette] talks about things like dressing the table, and what hour you gather people around it to eat. It reminded me of the rituals of my grandmother, who maintained them in the face of Jim Crow. We still need those kinds of rituals.”—Imani Perry, The New Yorker

“Home is a reflection of what we inherit.”

Grappling with the state of the world over the last few years—the global pandemic, climate change, threats to women’s rights, constant racial violence—LaTonya Yvette began to contemplate the concept of home. What does it mean to cultivate safety when it is constantly under threat? How can we nurture joy and peace within the spaces where we spend most of our precious time? Who can we turn to for guidance along the way?

In Stand in My Window: Meditations on Home and How We Make It, Yvette explores these kinds of questions as she takes readers through the journey of her own rediscovery of home. In eleven meditative essays, accompanied by 25 beautiful photographs taken over the course of writing the book, Yvette illustrates how the act of homemaking can be revolutionary, liberating—and one of the most powerful expressions we have of self- and community care.

Woven throughout the book is the story of the nearly 200-year-old house in upstate New York that Yvette bought and painstakingly renovated, with the aim of creating a safe space for BIPOC communities. The house—Yvette’s ultimate expression of home—provides her greatest lessons. Both visual feast and emotional salve, Stand in My Window demonstrates that home truly is what you make of it—in mind, body, soul, and in the thoughtfully curated spaces we can build for ourselves anywhere.