12 Must-Read Books on Textiles and Fiber Art
Titles on contemporary Diné weavers, Black American quilting in California, the Bayeux Tapestry, artists including Cecilia Vicuña and Olga de Amaral, and more.
There’s a reason the lexicon of textiles and fiber lends itself so well to storytelling — we thread the needle, weave the tale, spin the yarn. Writers have reached for these metaphors for centuries because they feel true to life, but artists know they’re also true to craft and its tangled histories. We’ve gathered a few recent books on embroidery, fiber art, weaving, and more that deserve a closer look, from Black Southern quilting and Korean bojagi to Palestinian tatreez and contemporary Diné weaving. Refreshingly, so many of these titles complicate or refuse reductive, familiar frameworks and open up new ways to understand the meditative and political dimensions of textile traditions, moving past the false dichotomy of “craft versus art” and sexist and tired notions of “women’s work.” You might even say these books piece together a new history of textile art, stitch by stitch. —Lakshmi Rivera Amin, associate editor and books editor
Reparative Craft: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick as a Textile Artist by Jason Edwards | Duke University Press, 2026
I know Eve Sedgwick from her deeply influential work in queer and literary theory, but it had somehow escaped me that she was also an artist. This book, which straddles literary and craft theory, examines her textile art between the mid-1990s and 2000s — the period in which she was also writing Touching Feeling. Some of those same ideas — particularly her preoccupation with Buddhism — can be found in her dreamy textile collages and sculptures meditating on illness, repair, and death. —Lisa Yin Zhang
Stories in the Seams: A People's History of Black Quilts and Their Makers by Sharbreon Plummer | Chronicle Books, 2026
In an opinion piece for Hyperallergic in June, Sharbreon Plummer argued that Black American quilts are inseparable from the inner lives of their makers. Organized into three parts, “memory,” “method,” and “medicine,” Stories in the Seams is the fruit of that pivotal reframing. This compassionate collection of essays, homages, and interviews with Black American quiltmakers centers their interiority as much as their technique. Plummer — who also participated in a roundtable in Routed West, featured in this list as well — traces these quilts’ influence on artists and writers like Romare Bearden and bell hooks. As she writes in her introduction, “Black quilts remind us that healing, connection, and creativity are still possible.” —Lakshmi Rivera Amin
