About

Rachel May, PhD, MFA, is the author of An American Quilt: Unfolding a Story of Family and Slavery, (Pegasus Books, 2018), which the The New Yorker calls "a meticulous and insightful account of slavery's role in early mercantile America," as well as The Benedictines (Braddock Avenue Books, 2016), a novella in shorts, The Experiments: A Legend in Pictures and Words (Dusie Press, 2015), sewn images and fiction, and Quilting with a Modern Slant, a Library Journal and Amazon Best Book of 2014. Her embroidered illustrations accompany two novellas published by Jaded Ibis Press and have been shown in galleries in the midwest.

Her work has won many awards and has recently appeared or is forthcoming in The New York Times, Outside, Public Books, Smithsonian, Condé Nast Traveler, LitHub, National Geographic, Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Volta, LARB, Cream City Review, Word for/Word, Indiana Review, The Literary Review, among others. She's been a resident and fellow at The Vermont Studio Center, the VCCA, and The Millay Colony.