Raised in Clay

Raised in Clay is a remarkable portrait of pottery making in the South, one of the oldest and richest craft traditions in America. Focusing on more than thirty potters in North Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Texas, Mississippi, and Kentucky, Nancy Sweezy tells how families preserve and practice the traditional art of pottery making today.

First published in 1984, Sweezy’s book documents the last generation of potters to have direct contact with preindustrial pottery traditions. It portrays the personalities of the potters, treating this aspect as carefully as the traditions themselves, and discusses various types of wheels, glazes, and kilns and each potter’s specialty pieces. Photographs and line drawings showing potters, their potteries and equipment, examples of finished work, and step-by-step works in progress enhance the text. Sweezy’s introductory chapter provides a superb history of southern pottery making. For this edition, she has added a new afterword on recent changes in the potting scene.