Stand in My Window

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

Growing up in New York in the 1990s, LaTonya Yvette experienced many versions of home. She witnessed her loved ones transform their often-imperfect environments into sites of possibility: her mother, waxing old wood floors on hands and knees until they looked new again; her grandmother, decorating her home with thrift store finds and discarded objects plucked from the street--"treasures possessed of their own mysterious stories." The lesson was handed down to her like an heirloom: Any place could be made beautiful simply by inhabiting it. Home could be self- and community care--a meaningful and creative task taken up each day.

In Stand in My Window: Meditations on Home and How We Make It, Yvette charts her journey to find home through some of the spaces she's given the name to: apartments, overseas stays, an old house in upstate New York, and even her own body. In eleven poignant, meditative essays, coupled with 25 beautiful photographs taken over the course of writing the book, Yvette shows readers what it means to consider the very personal--and deeply collective--role of "home" in all of our lives.

Both visual feast and emotional salve, Stand in My Window demonstrates that home truly is what we make of it--in mind, body, soul, and in the lovingly curated spaces we can build for ourselves anywhere.

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.