Author and quilt historian Janneken Smucker has been named the co-winner of the 2023 New Deal Book Award for her most recent book “A New Deal for Quilts.”

The award is issued annually by the California-based nonprofit Living New Deal. Officially established in 2007 at the University of California, Berkeley, Living New Deal exists with the goal of documenting the legacy of the New Deal. The organization’s book award was established in 2021 to recognize and encourage nonfiction works about U.S. history during the New Deal era.

Submitted works are reviewed by a revolving committee of academics and New Deal historians from around the United States. The topics of these works run the gamut, ranging from biographies and essay collections to art histories and political analyses.

Smucker’s book was published in 2023 by the International Quilt Museum (IQM) and is distributed by the University of Nebraska Press. She shares this year’s award with author Brooke L. Blower for her book “Americans in a World at War: Intimate Histories from the Crash of Pan Am’s Yankee Clipper.”

“‘A New Deal for Quilts’ offers a fresh perspective on how policies designed to combat the Great Depression shaped the daily lives of ordinary Americans — especially women — and how, in turn, domestic practices such as quilting influenced those very policies,” wrote Scott Borchert in Living New Deal’s review of Smucker’s book. “Smucker’s clear prose and expert knowledge, combined with the book’s sumptuous visual design — featuring many striking black and white photographs from the 1930s alongside full color images of the quilts themselves — make this an exceptional contribution to the study of the New Deal.”

Smucker’s book delves into the United States government’s use of quilts and quiltmaking in response to the economic and financial turmoil of the Great Depression. The government promoted the comforting symbolism of quilts, in tandem with the thrifty components of making them, to publicize New Deal initiatives and bolster the vocational skills of impoverished women. The release of “A New Deal for Quilts” coincided with an exhibition of the same name featuring select 1930s-era quilts on display in the IQM’s Gottsch Gallery. A virtual tour of the gallery can be viewed at internationalquiltmuseum.org/exhibitions/past-exhibitions.

Smucker is a Professor of History at West Chester University in Pennsylvania. She hosts and coproduces “Running Stitch - A QSOS Podcast,” in partnership with the national non-profit Quilt Alliance, drawing on oral histories with contemporary quiltmakers.

Copies of “A New Deal for Quilts” are available online through the University of Nebraska Press. For more information on the book and Smucker’s research project, visit newdealquilts.janneken.org.

In celebration and recognition of the Living New Deal Book Award, Smucker will share aspects of her research at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library and Museum in Hyde Park, New York, as part of the 2024 Roosevelt Reading Festival on June 22. The event is free and open to the public. Smucker's author talk, along with the other presentations, will be recorded for later broadcast. For more information, visit fdrlibrary.org/events-calendar.

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The University of Nebraska Press, founded in 1941, is the largest university press between Chicago and California. UNP publishes scholarly and general-interest books (with more than 6,000 titles in print and an additional 140 new titles released each year.) In addition to the Nebraska imprint, the Press also publishes books under Bison Books, The Backwaters Press, and Potomac Books imprints and publishes the books of The Jewish Publication Society. For information about review copies, email [email protected].

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The International Quilt Museum is home to the world’s largest publicly held quilt collection, with objects from over 65 countries dating as far back as the 1600s. Founded in 1997, the museum was anchored at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln by a donation of nearly 1,000 quilts from Ardis and Robert James. To learn more about the museum and the exhibitions now showing, visit internationalquiltmuseum.org.