A poet exploring kin keeping might write about the specific labor of the family genealogist, who maintains the photographs, documents, stories, and relationships that constitute a family's collective memory, exploring both the love and the burden of this role; Lucille Clifton's genealogical poems are sustained acts of kin keeping in poetic form, insisting on the names, stories, and specificities of her ancestors against the forces of historical erasure and forgetting; A student poet might write about a specific kin keeping practice learned from a grandmother, the sending of birthday cards, the maintenance of an address book, the keeping of a family Bible with births and deaths recorded, as a form of cultural and historical preservation that far exceeds its apparent ordinariness; The specific experience of kin keeping in post-slavery African American families, where the systematic destruction of family bonds under slavery makes every act of connection and memory an act of resistance against that historical violence, gives the practice particular political weight; A contemporary poet might write about digital kin keeping, the Facebook groups, online genealogy research, and social media connections that contemporary Black families use to maintain bonds across geographic dispersal, exploring both the new possibilities and the new vulnerabilities of these forms; Nikky Finney's attention to the matrilineal lines of knowledge transmission in South Carolina's Gullah Geechee community engages kin keeping as a specifically feminine practice through which cultural sovereignty is maintained generation by generation