Food + Sisterhood

A Chapter for Us is a year-long underground literary-culinary society for adults. Each month, we gather around one book by a Black woman author and one ingredient, and we move through an evening served in courses. The book is how you come in, and the culinary classroom is where the reading comes alive.

Every Chapter Is a Barter

At our table, everyone contributes. Each month's title names the exchange. In A Chapter for Courage, we bring a new way to prepare an ingredient, and you bring your courage: your honest read on where it lives in you and where it's being asked of you. The work of the evening is connecting the dots between the culinary, the community, and the page. We trade perspective for perspective, and everyone leaves with more than they brought.

What Your Seat Includes

A book club gives you a reading list. A Chapter for Us gives you a curriculum. Each month is designed by a chef and a public health professional working together, so every book comes with a technique to learn, a system to understand, and a set of questions built to stay with you after the evening ends.

Every month, your seat includes:

• The book. The month's selection is yours to keep, to mark up, and to come back to.

• The evening. A hands-on culinary class served in courses, led by Chef Sicily Sierra and Taylor Outler, MPH. At Kind Kitchen, cooking is the vehicle and the process is the point. Over the course of the evening, the technique, the people at the table, and the words on the page begin to expand one another. A new way of preparing ingredients becomes a new way into the story, and the story changes how you see what's on the page. The conversation in the classroom asks you to name what you feel, what you value, and what you're ready to carry forward. You leave with a new skill, a new lens, and a clearer sense of yourself.

• The annotation kit. At the center of each kit is the month's long annotation guide, and its job is to shift the lens. It shows you the book through a culinary eye, the ingredients through a public health eye, and yourself through both, until each one starts to hold more than it first appeared to. The guide is where you connect the dots, write back to the book, and watch your thinking expand across the year.

Your 2027 Journey

The year reads like a book, with four parts and twelve Chapters.

Part One: Becoming (January to March) We begin at the edge of the unknown, find our footing, name our worth, and give ourselves room to dream.

• January: While Justice Sleeps, A Chapter for Courage
• February: Die for Me, A Chapter for Knowing Your Worth
• March: If I Ruled the World, A Chapter for Dreaming Bigger

Part Two: Voice (April to June) Once we know who we want to become, we tell the truth about who we are, say it out loud, and let ourselves be seen.

• April: The Revelation of Dionne Daphne, A Chapter for Telling the Truth
• May: Daggermouth, A Chapter for Speaking Up
• June: Seven Days in June, A Chapter for Being Seen

Part Three: What We Carry (July to September) We decide what to put down, what to reach for, and what was handed to us by the people who came before.

• July: Leave Your Mess at Home, A Chapter for Letting Go
• August: Sweet Heat, A Chapter for Wanting More
• September: The Secret World of Maggie Grey, A Chapter for Remembering Our Roots

Part Four: Wholeness (October to December) We close the year by trusting ourselves, restoring what needs care, and asking what remains when everything unnecessary falls away.

• October: Grown, A Chapter for Trusting Yourself
• November: Restore Me, A Chapter for Making Yourself Whole
• December: The Coldest Winter Ever, A Chapter for What Remains

A Year at the Same Table

A Chapter for Us is designed as a full-year experience. You'll spend the year with the same group of readers, building trust Chapter by Chapter, which makes the conversations deeper each month. By December, you'll have twelve books, twelve new techniques, a full year of annotation guides in your own words, and a table of people who have watched you grow.

This is intellectual work treated the way it deserves: hosted beautifully, fed with intention, and priced to match the care that goes into every evening.

About Ink & Ingredients

Ink & Ingredients is an underground lit-cooking society for adults who read with their whole body, Black women authors, one book, one theme, every month, split between literacy practice and hands-on cooking.

We want to foster reading and comprehension - but we don't skip the basics to get there. Every session lays the foundation first: how to annotate, how to journal instead of just brain dump, how to cite a source, how to find the throughline between what you read and what you already know.

The why

Americans read an average of 12.6 books a year — the lowest number Gallup has recorded since it began tracking this in 1990. The typical, or median, American reads just 4 books a year; the average is pulled upward by a small share of very heavy readers.

Reading level tells a harder story. The average American reads at only a 7th- to 8th-grade level, and more than half of U.S. adults score at Level 2 literacy or below — proficient enough only for the most basic reading tasks.

That's not a knock on anyone. It's a system that stopped investing in reading a long time ago. We're building it back — one book and one meal at a time.

Knowledge is power isn't enough. Real power comes from clarity, understanding, and empathy — the ability to hold information well enough to hand it to someone else, so they walk away both educated and understood. That's what Ink & Ingredients is built to do.

What we teach every session

• Annotation
• Journaling vs. Brain Dumping
• Reference Pages & Citations
• Comprehension