Stand in My Window

“Home is a reflection of what we inherit.”

Grappling with the state of the world over the last few years—a global pandemic, climate change, threats on women’s rights, constant racial violence—LaTonya Yvette began to contemplate home. What does it mean to cultivate safety and belonging even as forces outside of your control regularly threaten to unravel them? How can we locate joy and peace within the spaces we spend most of our precious time? Who or what can we look to for guidance along the way?

In Stand in My Window: Meditations on Home and 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, coupled with 25 beautiful photographs taken over the course of writing the book, Yvette illustrates how the act of home-making can be revolutionary, liberatory—and one of the most powerful expressions we have of self and community care. A clothesline that recalls the resiliency of ancestors; an Epsom salt bath that reveals her body’s worth; the red toolbox that serves as a reminder of her capabilities. These examples and more act as Yvette’s powerful guides.

Woven throughout is the story of the nearly 200-year-old house in upstate New York that she 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 lesson. 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.