Favorites Fall 2025: Stay-On Baby Shoes, Inclusive Cooking Lessons, and a New Tune-Yards Album

Smith Quarterly

A quarterly collection of stuff we love from students, staff, faculty, and alums

BY MEGAN TKACY

Published November 17, 2025

Art

An existential crisis prompted Phyllis Fewster Rosser ’56 to begin making wood sculptures in the 1960s. Having left Boston for the Jersey Shore, she began wandering the beaches there, collecting branches and contemplating this new chapter of her life. A few years later, while reeling from a fight with a neighbor, Rosser broke out her wood collection and started hammering away, pounding pieces together to form an irregular shape. She hung the finished product and it caught the eye of the late Nancy Azara, an artist who mentored her and encouraged her to keep creating. Rosser’s sculptures range from small, 12-inch works to 8-footers, with most pieces constructed using wood sourced from Bellows Falls, Vermont. “The wood comes in many colors, showcasing the beauty of the ravages of time,” Rosser says.

Explore wood sculptures and paintings

Clothing

Bows, bucket hats, and burp cloths—oh my! Seiko Sisco ’08 sells all that and more through Waku Waku Baby, a company she launched in 2019. “At ﬁrst, I started sewing out of necessity since my son was quite a drooler and needed absorbent, stylish bibs,” Sisco says. “When he started walking, I started making shoes that were adjustable around the ankle and fully lined for comfort, but that he wouldn’t be able to take oﬀ himself.” Six years later, stay-on baby shoes are Sisco’s bestselling product, and they’re available in a variety of patterns and prints also designed by Sisco.

Buy stay-on baby shoes

A collection of colored baby shoes arranged in a circle

Exhibitions

“I haven’t always been a painter, but I have spent much of my life working, however circuitously, toward becoming one,” says Jane Timken ’64, whose exhibit Rooftops & Roses is on display in the Alumnae House Gallery through January 21, 2026. The exhibit captures flowers in watercolor and the rooftops of Boston’s Back Bay neighborhood in charcoal. Timken says she initially felt more conﬁdent studying art than creating it, but her desire to paint was reignited during a ﬂy-fishing trip, of all things: “I thought how much more interesting it would be if I could make watercolor paintings of the scenery instead of taking endless photos that would end up unseen in a drawer.”

Plan to see the “Rooftops & Roses” exhibit

Fiction

Leila Mottley ’23, author of the acclaimed novel Nightcrawling (2023) and the poetry collection woke up no light (2024), released her latest novel, The Girls Who Grew Big (Knopf), over the summer. The story follows a group of teenage mothers—known as “the Girls”—as they navigate small-town life on the Florida Panhandle. At the center of the story is Adela, banished to Florida by Midwestern parents who reject her decision to have a child at 16. In the Sunshine State, Adela faces judgment from locals who believe she’s lost her way, but she also gains strength from the Girls’ friendship as she searches for love and embraces motherhood.

Read “The Girls Who Grew Big”

Nonfiction

To call The Gloomy Girl Variety Show (The Feminist Press, 2025) by Freda Epum ’15 just a memoir would be selling it short. Nothing about the book is conventional. Rather than filling each page with text, Epum shares her thoughts in a curated, experimental format—sometimes just a single sentence that commands attention, other times footnotes that weave in research and context. The book’s through line is Epum’s search for a “forever home,” and across its 224 pages she explores what it means to never quite belong. Punctuated by original poems and black-and-white self-portraits, The Gloomy Girl Variety Show tackles difficult subjects—self-harm, racism, depression—with creativity and authenticity.

Read “The Gloomy Girl Variety Show”

Food

Cooking instructor Kate Sonders Solomon ’00 discovered her love of food during her junior year abroad in Florence. “One of the host moms had a weekly cooking class where we honed our Italian language skills over risotto, pasta, tiramisu, and other very Italian dishes,” she recalls. This year marks the 10th anniversary of Solomon’s cooking instruction business, through which she teaches children and adults the fundamentals of making good food. No experience is required—and her most requested lesson is fresh pasta. “It’s so rare in today’s frenetic digital society to ﬁnd an activity that is so quietly meditative and mindful,” she says. “Pasta-making is magical.”

Book a hands-on cooking class

Children’s Books

A Halloween-themed book with an evergreen story about the excitement of make-believe, This Year, a Witch! (Atheneum/Caitlyn Dlouhy Books, 2025) is the newest release from author-illustrator Zoey Abbott ’96. Abbott says the book was inspired by a moment from her childhood: “I very much wanted to be a witch for Halloween. I got a sparkly black hat, and my stepmother made me a dress and did my makeup. I looked in the mirror and promptly ran oﬀ screaming. I had scared myself! I decided to work with this idea—haven’t all kids experimented with their own ‘power’ and been a little surprised by it?”

Read “This Year, a Witch!”

Fiction

Emily Everett ’09’s All That Life Can Afford (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2025) follows a young American woman, Anna, who must navigate love and class structures in London while trying to stay true to herself. Things get interesting for Anna when she’s ﬂown to the coastal French town of Saint-Tropez to tutor a wealthy teenager. There, she’s thrust into a world of partying and jet-setting that challenges her both financially and emotionally. Having studied in the United Kingdom during her junior year abroad at Smith and as a graduate student, Everett is able to perfectly capture the essence of London life in her debut novel—a Reese’s Book Club selection.

Read “All That Life Can Afford”

Nonfiction

Playhouses and Privilege: The Architecture of Elite Childhood (University of Minnesota Press, 2025) by Abigail Van Slyck ’81 brings readers into the tiny worlds of approximately 30 playhouses built between the 1850s and the 1930s. The Searses, Fords, and Vanderbilts are among the recognizable families represented in Playhouses and Privilege, with pages dedicated to floor plans and photographs of their children’s playhouses. “I hope readers will see that these buildings—despite their small size and charming appearance—were serious works of architecture,” says Van Slyck, adding that she especially enjoyed writing about the royal playhouse used by Queen Victoria and Prince Albert’s nine children.

Read “Playhouses and Privilege”

Audiobooks

A social media star known for her point-of-view videos, many of which poke fun at “that girl” in relatable and usually cringey situations, Sabrina Brier ’17 has branched out into longer-form content with her new audiobook, That Friend (Simon & Schuster Audio Originals, 2025). “After a certain point of developing my online material, the world started to feel bigger than one-minute videos,” Brier says. Four hours and seven minutes in length, That Friend is about the power of female friendship and found family. Its characters are voiced by famous names including Rachel Dratch (Saturday Night Live), Lukas Gage (The White Lotus), and Rachel Zegler (Snow White).

Listen to “That Friend”

Music

Tune-Yards frontwoman Merrill Garbus ’01’s music can be described as fun and fresh, unexpected and untraditional. Her band’s latest album, Better Dreaming, was released in May and delivers funky songs you can move to (“Heartbreak”) as well as slower introspective tracks (“Suspended” and “See You There”) across its 40-minute run time. Tune-Yards started as a solo project but is now a family band, with Garbus’s partner, Nate Brenner, co-writing and -producing. “Collaboration is much more satisfying than self-protective isolation, even though—and because—it’s a big exercise in trust,” Garbus says.

Listen to “Better Dreaming”

Bloggers

Journalist Itoro Bassey ’09 launched Africanish, her Substack newsletter, during a time of transition. “I was moving away from the urgency of the newsroom and into something slower, more embodied,” says Bassey, who’s worked as a producer for the BBC. “I wanted a space to explore what it means to live as a diasporic African woman who carries not only personal history but inherited memory, and who also desires clarity, rest, and deeper connection.” Through Africanish, she explores themes of identity, culture, and the “in-between places that define so many of us.” The response has been moving, she says: “I’ve received messages from other African writers, mothers, and daughters who say the writing helps them feel seen and affirmed.”

Read the “Africanish” Substack