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Stiles African American Heritage Center
Volunteer Day in the Stiles African American Heritage Garden
Hosted by Stiles and the Metro-Denver Chapter of the Colorado Native Plant Society
April 18, 1:00 pm - 4:00 pm, volunteer event
Join us for spring spruce-up of the Stiles Gardens! We will be giving away pollinator powerhouses that were installed with the People & Pollinators Action Network as we thin the garden to open space for more diverse plantings. Seeds will be sown & are available to take home. Kala Greene, director of the Stiles Center will be on hand from 2-4p to give tours of the Heritage Center.
Click Here to Register for this Event!
Book Reading and Signing with Camille Dungy
Saturday, May 23, 2026 from 2 to 4 p.m. at the Stiles Center
Join us for this event co-hosted with the Habitat Library! Camille Dungy will read and sign her books "America, A Love Story and Soil: The Story of a Black Mother's Garden..
Camille T. Dungy is the author of America, A Love Story (Wesleyan UP: 2026). She has also written the memoir Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden, the essay collection Guidebook to Relative Strangers, and four other collections of poetry, including Trophic Cascade, winner of the Colorado Book Award. Dungy edited Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry, the first anthology to bring African American environmental poetry to national attention.
Camille is University Distinguished Professor at Colorado State University, Dungy’s honors include the 2021 Academy of American Poets Fellowship, a 2019 Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Book Award, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts in both prose and poetry.
Photo credit: Beowulf Sheehan
SAAHC Receives a Walking Together Grant!
The Stiles African American Heritage Center is honored to have been awarded a Walking Together grant! Join us during the Winter Seed Swap on the 24th to celebrate this accomplishment (see details below).
Walking Together aims to facilitate a robust regional and national support network for traditional arts, support collaborative documentation and marketing services, and address historic precarity and disinvestment in folk arts and culture that communities of color face. Organizations and individuals deeply engaged in sustaining their community’s traditions receive unrestricted grants through Walking Together, with the aim of supporting their existing work and bolstering community traditions and knowledge into the future.
Walking Together allows us to carry on the vision and legacy of Grace Stiles, who 30 years ago founded the Stiles African American Heritage Center as a cultural pillar of the historically Black neighborhood of Five Points in Denver. We are excited to grow ways we may weave community in the garden and around community tea tables, where we share food prepared with love, stitch together histories as part of quilting circles, inspire each other by honoring the accomplishments of community members, and delve into social contexts through hosting book clubs and signings.
The Taste of Country Cooking
Saturday, June 13th - Book Club: 50th Anniversary of Edna Lewis' The Taste of Country Cooking
Saturday, June 13th - Book Club: 50th Anniversary of Edna Lewis' The Taste of Country Cooking
Saturday, June 13th - Book Club: 50th Anniversary of Edna Lewis' The Taste of Country Cooking
During this event we will explore the recipes and cooking wisdom included in Edna's 50th anniversary printing of this edition. We will also collectively plan the follow up event to this one, a potluck using Edna's recipes! This event is co-sponsored by the Habitat Library.
The Taste of Country Cooking Potluck - Date TBD
Saturday, June 13th - Book Club: 50th Anniversary of Edna Lewis' The Taste of Country Cooking
Saturday, June 13th - Book Club: 50th Anniversary of Edna Lewis' The Taste of Country Cooking
Join us later in the summer of 2026 to enjoy a potluck featuring the recipes from The Taste of Country Cooking book. More details to follow.
This event is graciously co-sponsored by:
Saturday, June 13th - Book Club: 50th Anniversary of Edna Lewis' The Taste of Country Cooking
This event is graciously co-sponsored by:
A library about people, nature and land.
Recurring Annual Events
Juneteenth
Every year on June 19th the SAAHC hosts a partner event to the larger community celebration. We serve the traditional red drinks and watermelon to all who pass by! Juneteenth National Independence Day, is a federal holiday in the U.S. . It is celebrated to commemorate the end of slavery in the United States. The holiday's name, first used in the 1890s, is a portmanteau of June and nineteenth, referring to June 19, 1865, the day when Major General Gordon Granger ordered the final enforcement of the Emancipation Proclamation in Galveston, Texas at the end of the American Civil War.
Kwanzaa
The SAAHC is proud to be the home of the Kwanzaa Committee of Denver. The committee annual, seven-day public celebrations of the African American holiday from December 26 to January 1, focusing on culture, community, and the seven principles (Nguzu Saba). Click here to watch a video about the Kwanzaa Committee of Denver.
SAAHC Director, Kala Greene, is a member of the Kwanzaa Circle of Wisdom. SAAHC Advisory Board member, Deborah Sims Fard, is the executive director of the Kwanzaa Committee of Denver.