CAMDEN — The Camden Public Library welcomes Anna Zilboorg, who will speak to the audience about “Surviving Disaster with Knitting in Hand,” on Tuesday, May 7, at 6:30 p.m., in the Picker Room. This program will be in-person only.
 
The richness of colors, textures, and patterns that are vivid in Anna Zilboorg‘s knitted creations reflect the multi-faceted tapestry of her personal and professional life. Now 91 years old, she has lived in NYC, Cambridge, Meadows of Dan in the Blue Ridge Mountains, and currently in Rockland, with past travels to Turkey and Armenia to study Middle Eastern knitting patterns.
 
Her formal schooling ended with a PhD in Comparative Literature from Harvard and 11 years of teaching at MIT. Zilboorg has also run a shelter for street kids, cooked for a monastery, and sold her work at Washington, D.C. and Philadelphia craft shows. She has raised two children and has just welcomed her fourth great-grandchild into the world.
 
Zilboorg considers herself primarily a teacher, though she has a store on the fiber arts website Ravelry. Of her six books, she considers Knitting for Anarchists the most useful, and because of this book, she has been known as the “anarchist knitter.”
 
Zilboorg will talk about knitting, not as a hobby, but as a useful and important part of living a good life in a really hard time. In her words, “Personally, it gets us out of anxiety and anger, into beautiful things. Socially, it mends divisions and creates possibilities.”