With Her Own Hands: Women Weaving Their Stories
By Nicole Nehrig
W.W. Norton & Co., 2025

Spanning continents and centuries, With Her Own Hands tells how textiles have been a way for women to explore their intellectual capacities, seek economic independence, create community, process trauma, and convey powerful messages of self-expression, beauty, and political protest. Nehrig brings together remarkable stories of women, from an eighteenth-century Quaker boarding school that used embroidered samplers to teach girls math and geography, to the Miao women of southern China who, in the absence of a written language, pass down their histories in elaborate “story cloths.”

This event is presented in partnership with Rehoboth Art League and Rehoboth Beach Writers Guild. 

About the Author
Nicole Nehrig is a clinical and research psychologist who studied psychology and fine art at Washington University, St. Louis, before earning her PhD at Long Island University. Her passion for knitting and textile crafts is part of her practice and research. Nehrig and her family live in Brooklyn.

Purchase the book
Please help support local independent bookstores by purchasing this book at Browseabout Books, official bookseller of the History Book Festival. Online sources and digital versions are tempting; however, supporting local brick and mortar shops helps to preserve our vibrant main streets. Drop by Browseabout, order books online, or call the store at 302-226-2665. You also may purchase a copy at biblion in Lewes.

About the Festival
The History Book Festival is the first and only book festival in the United States devoted exclusively to history. With the help of our presenting funding partners — Delaware Humanities and The Lee Ann Wilkinson Group, Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices | PenFed Realty — as well as our program and community partners, volunteers, and donors, the 2025 History Book Festival will be full of great discussions with authors of newly published narrative nonfiction and historical fiction. 

Thanks to all of our donors, especially our education and outreach funding partners: Ronald Collins & Susan Cohen, Carolyn & Aaron Nayer, Jen Mason & Clare Hancock, and Browseabout Books. HBF authors visit classrooms in Delaware, and HBF provides their books to schools, libraries, and community organizations.

Our Keynote event is presented by Griswold Home Care for Sussex and Kent Counties and Sally Mott Freeman & John K. Freeman; our Closing event is presented by the Delaware Community Foundation. Saturday’s Spirited Discussion, our gathering for attendees and presenters to celebrate and discuss their day, is presented by Dogfish Head Beer & Benevolence.

Special thanks to our Founding Program Partners for their continuing support: the Lewes Public Library, for event promotion and production, and Browseabout Books in Rehoboth Beach, official bookseller of the History Book Festival. Thanks also to the  Lewes Chamber of Commerce for event promotion, and the Cape Gazette and Delmarva Public Media, our media partners.