About this item
"Facing death is the hardest thing of all, and Tallu Quinn faces hers in a way that broke and healed my heart. This book is a beautiful tribute to life, to truth, and to love." - Glennon Doyle, author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Untamed Profound essays on nurturing life while facing a terminal diagnosis, from the dedicated humanitarian and young mother creating "a vibrant legacy for us to hold on to and learn from" (Ann Patchett) "I am holding both my hope and my grief together in the same hands. It is a loose hold, looser than I am accustomed to. My love is so much bigger than me."Nonprofit leader and minister Tallu Schuyler Quinn spent her adult life working to alleviate hunger, systemic inequality, and food waste, first as a volunteer throughout the United States and abroad, and then as the founder of the Nashville Food Project, where she supported the vibrant community work of local food justice in Middle Tennessee.
About the Author
A Nashville, TN native, Tallu founded The Nashville Food Project in 2011 at the age of 31. With fierce hope and an expansive vision, she shepherded the organization for a decade through an incredible evolution. What began from a modest church kitchen and a handful of volunteers delivering sandwiches to homeless camps morphed into multi-pronged, interrelated initiatives for food justice. Under Tallu's guidance, hundreds of thousands of scratch-made, nourishing meals have been shared across the city. Then in July 2020, Tallu was diagnosed with glioblastoma, an aggressive brain cancer. She died from the disease on February 17, 2022. Tallu was 42."As a very young woman, Ms. Quinn saw a desperate need in her city," Margaret Renkl wrote in The New York Times in 2021. "Step by step, enlisting thousands of others in a shared mission, she found a vast array of ways to meet it."Indeed, community beats at the heart of the mission Tallu helmed at The Nashville Food Project - "bringing people together to grow, cook and share nourishing food with the goals of cultivating community and alleviating hunger in our city." Her vision for community food security in which everyone in Nashville has access to the food they want and need, is both radical and achievable. But she's also been known to say that the "bringing people together" aim of the mission is its most radical claim. She believed good food is more than a basic human need, it is a human right, and it can foster more than good health - it imbues a sense of belonging and purpose. She demonstrated in her life and work that community built through food can highlight our interdependence with one another and the Earth while piercing through the loneliness, isolation and feelings of scarcity so often associated with poverty. Along with a boundless energy and open, accepting love for humanity, Tallu also embodied the values of the Food Project: hospitality, stewardship, justice, interdependence, learning and transformation. The latter she often spoke about with a "fiercest hope" that people and situations can change. An inspiring teacher, speaker, writer and leader, she could fire up a crowd to action, weed a raised bed or clean out a walk-in cooler with equal intensity. She championed and shared the joy, hope and love in difficult food justice work. But even as an uplifting visionary to all those around her, she wasn't afraid to deliver a realistic picture too, ever empathetic and aiming to untangle the systemic problems that lead to the need for food justice work in the first place. But rather than fall paralyzed at a never-ending news cycle of "fires ablaze, a poisoned planet groaning beneath the weight of overpopulation, drought, displacement and centuries-old conflict and war," she urged that "it's radical to stay active and believing that we as individuals or small communities can make a dent of a difference." "I recen
