Stand in My Window: Author Talk with LaTonya Yvette

In this webinar, author LaTonya Yvette talks about her new book Stand in My Window: Meditations on Home and How We Make It. Buy the book here.

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. “Home is a reflection of what we inherit.” Following LaTonya's presentation, she was joined in conversation by Katy Peace, the League's Director of Communications.

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.

Photograph by Rog and Bee Walker for Stand In My Window

About the Author: LaTonya Yvette is a multimedia storyteller who writes the newsletter "With Love, L." Yvette's first book, Woman of Color, was included in an installation of Jay-Z's personal bookshelf for Brooklyn Public Library's Book of HOV exhibit. She also co-authored the illustrated children's book The Hair Book with Amanda Jane Jones. Yvette is the owner and steward of The Mae House, an upstate New York rental property and the home of Rest as Residency, which offers BIPOC families a no-cost place for rest and focus.

This author talk is presented as part of the Preservation League of NYS's Preservation Book Club. Thank you to our sponsor, the Peggy N. & Roger G. Gerry Charitable Trust.