Well-Read Black Girl: Finding Our Stories, Discovering Ourselves

by Glory Edim

  MARITA GOLDEN is an award-winning author of more than a dozen works of fiction and nonfiction. Her most recent novel, The Wide Circumference of Love, was a 2018 NAACP Image Award Nominee and was named a best book of 2017 by NPR. As a teacher of writing, she has served as a member of the faculties of George Mason University, Virginia Commonwealth University, the Fairfield University, and Johns Hopkins University. She co-founded and serves as president emeritus of the Hurston/Wright Foundation. She is the recipient of many awards, including the Writers for Writers Award presented by Barnes & Noble and Poets & Writers, and the Fiction Award for her novel After, awarded by the Black Caucus of the American Library Association.

  KAITLYN GREENIDGE is the author of We Love You, Charlie Freeman (Algonquin Books), one of the New York Times Critics Top 10 Books of 2016. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Vogue, Glamour, Elle.com, Buzzfeed, Transition Magazine, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Believer, American Short Fiction, and other places. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Whiting Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Radcliffe Institute, and other places. She is a contributing editor for LENNY Letter and a contributing writer to The New York Times.

  N. K. JEMISIN won the Hugo Award for Best Novel for The Fifth Season, which was also a New York Times Notable Book of 2015, and went on to win the award again for The Obelisk Gate and The Stone Sky. She previously won the Locus Award for her first novel, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, and her short fiction and novels have been nominated multiple times for Hugo, World Fantasy, Nebula, and RT Reviewers’ Choice awards, and shortlisted for the Crawford and the James Tiptree, Jr., awards. She is a science fiction and fantasy reviewer for The New York Times, and you can find her online at nkjemisin.com. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

  MORGAN JERKINS is the author of the New York Times bestselling essay collection This Will Be My Undoing. Her work has been featured in The New Yorker, Vogue, The New York Times, The Atlantic, Elle, Rolling Stone, Lenny, and BuzzFeed, among many others. She lives in New York.

  TAYARI JONES is the New York Times bestselling author of the novels Leaving Atlanta, The Untelling, Silver Sparrow, and An American Marriage. Her writing has appeared in Tin House, The Believer, The New York Times, and Callaloo. A member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers, she has also been a recipient of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, the Lifetime Achievement Award in the Fine Arts from the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, a United States Artist Fellowship, an NEA Literature Fellowship, and the Bunting Fellowship from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Silver Sparrow was added to the NEA Big Read library of classics in 2016, and An American Marriage was an Oprah’s Book Club selection in 2018. Jones is a graduate of Spelman College, the University of Iowa, and Arizona State University. She is a professor of creative writing at Emory University.

  BSRAT MEZGHEBE is a writer who explores how war and displacement have affected Eritreans and their diaspora-born children. She received her MFA from New York University and is currently finishing her first novel.

  LYNN NOTTAGE is a Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright and a screenwriter. Her plays, produced widely in the United States and throughout the world, include Sweat (Pulitzer Prize, Obie Award, Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, Tony Nomination, Drama Desk Nomination), By the Way, Meet Vera Stark (Lilly Award, Drama Desk Nomination), Ruined (Pulitzer Prize, Obie Award, Lucille Lortel, New York Drama Critics’ Circle, Audelco, Drama Desk, Outer Critics Circle Award), Intimate Apparel (American Theatre Critics and New York Drama Critics’ Circle Awards for Best Play), Fabulation, or The Re-Education of Undine (Obie Award), Crumbs from the Table of Joy, Las Meninas, Mud, River, Stone, Por’knockers, and POOF! She is the co-founder of the production company Market Road Films and is a writer/producer on the Netflix series She’s Gotta Have It, directed by Spike Lee. The recipient of a MacArthur “Genius Grant” Fellowship and several other grants and awards, she is a graduate of Brown University and the Yale School of Drama. She is also an associate professor in the Theatre Department at Columbia School of the Arts and an artist-in-residence at the Park Avenue Armory.

  STEPHANIE POWELL WATTS is an associate professor of English at Lehigh University, and has won numerous awards, including a Whiting Award, a Pushcart Prize, the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence, and the Southern Women’s Writers Award for Emerging Writer of the Year. Her debut novel, No One Is Coming to Save Us, won the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work, and she was a PEN/Hemingway finalist for her short-story collection We Are Taking Only What We Need.

  GABOUREY SIDIBE is an award-winning actress who is best known for the title role in Precious, based on the novel Push by Sapphire, for which she was nominated for an Oscar. She has since starred as Queenie in American Horror Story: Coven, Denise in Difficult People, and Becky in Empire. Sidibe recently made her directorial debut with the short film The Tale of Four. Her first book, This Is Just My Face: Try Not to Stare, came out in 2017. She was born in Brooklyn and raised in Harlem, New York.

  BARBARA SMITH is a Black feminist, author, and activist, and was the co-founder of and publisher at Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press. She has edited three major collections about Black women, including Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, and is co-editor with Wilma Mankiller, Gwendolyn Mink, Marysa Navarro, and Gloria Steinem of The Reader’s Companion to U.S. Women’s History. More than two decades of her writings are compiled in her book The Truth That Never Hurts: Writings on Race, Gender, and Freedom.

  REBECCA WALKER contributes to the global conversation about identity, power, and the evolution of the human family through writing books, developing film and television projects, speaking internationally, collaborating with artists and thought leaders, teaching at the university level, and participating in all forms of social media. She has authored seven bestselling books, written dozens of articles, developed television projects with NBC, BET, and Viacom, and written on the Amazon Prime series One Mississippi. She has spoken at over four hundred universities and corporate campuses internationally, including Harvard, Facebook, and TEDx Lund in Sweden. When she was twenty-one years old, she co-founded the Third Wave Fund for the empowerment of young women aged fifteen to thirty, which continues to make grants to women and transgender youth working for social justice. She was named one of the most influential leaders of her generation by Time Magazine.

  JESMYN WARD received her MFA from the University of Michigan and has received the MacArthur Genius Grant, a Stegner Fellowship, a John and Renee Grisham Writers Residency, and the Strauss Living Prize. She is the winner of two National Book Awards for Fiction for Sing, Unburied, Sing and Salvage the Bones. She is also the editor of The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks About Race and the author of the novel Where the Line Bleeds and the memoir Men We Reaped, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and won the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize and the Media for a Just Society Award. She is currently a professor of creative writing at Tulane University and lives in Mississippi.

  RENÉE WATSON is a New York Times bestselling author, educator, and activist. Her young adult novel Piecing Me Together received the Coretta Scott King Award and a Newbery Honor Award. Her poetry and fiction often center around the lived experiences of black girls and women, and explore themes of home, identity, and the intersections of race, class, and gender. Her young adult novels Piecing Me Together and This Side of Home were both nominated for the Best Fiction for Young Adults by the American Library Association. Her picture book Harlem’s Little Blackbird: The Story of Florence Mills received several honors, including an NAACP Image Award nomination in children’s literature, and her picture book, A Place Where Hurricanes Happen, is based on poetry workshops she facilitated with children in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Her one-woman show, Roses Are Red Women Are Blue, debuted at Lincoln Center at a showcase for emerging artists. In the summer of 2016 Ren
ée launched I, Too Arts Collective, a nonprofit committed to nurturing underrepresented voices in the creative arts. I, Too Arts Collective is housed in the Harlem brownstone where Langston Hughes lived and created. Renée grew up in Portland, Oregon, and currently lives in New York City.

  JAMIA WILSON is the executive director and publisher of the Feminist Press. An activist and writer, Wilson has contributed to New York magazine, The New York Times, the Today show, CNN, BBC, Teen Vogue, Elle, Refinery 29, Rookie, and The Guardian. She is the author of Young, Gifted, and Black and a co-author of Road Map for Revolutionaries, and she wrote the introduction and oral history to Together We Rise: Behind the Scenes at the Protest Heard Around the World.

  JACQUELINE WOODSON is the 2014 National Book Award Winner for her New York Times bestselling memoir Brown Girl Dreaming, which was also a recipient of the Coretta Scott King Award, a Newbery Honor Award, the NAACP Image Award, and the Sibert Honor Award. She is also the author of the New York Times bestselling novel Another Brooklyn, which was a 2016 National Book Award Finalist and Woodson’s first adult novel in twenty years. In 2015, Woodson was named Young People’s Poet Laureate by the Poetry Foundation, and in 2018, she was named National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature by the Library of Congress. She is the author of more than two dozen award-winning books for young adults, middle graders, and children; among her many accolades, she is a four-time Newbery Honor winner, a three-time National Book Award finalist, and a two-time Coretta Scott King Award winner.

  PHOTO: © JAI LENNARD

  GLORY EDIM is the founder of Well-Read Black Girl, a Brooklyn-based book club and online community that celebrates the uniqueness of Black literature and sisterhood. In fall 2017, she organized the first-ever Well-Read Black Girl Literary Festival. She has worked as a creative strategist for over ten years at startups and cultural institutions, including Kickstarter, The Webby Awards, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. She received the 2017 Innovator’s Award from the Los Angeles Times Book Prizes for her work as a literary advocate. She serves on the board of New York City’s Housing Works Bookstore and lives in Brooklyn, New York.

  wellreadblackgirl.com

  Facebook.com/​wellreadblackgirls

  Twitter: @wellreadblkgirl and @guidetoglo

  Instagram: @wellreadblackgirl and @guidetoglo

  ABOUT THE ILLUSTRATOR

  ALEXANDRA BOWMAN is an Oakland-based illustrator and designer. The California native graduated with a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago before moving back to the Golden State in 2014. You can find her work in The New York Times, Eater, Girlboss, and John Hopkins Magazine. She has illustrated for organizations such as the NAACP and the ACLU, and her work has been exhibited at universities and galleries across the United States.

  What’s next on

  your reading list?

  Discover your next

  great read!

  * * *

  Get personalized book picks and up-to-date news about this author.

  Sign up now.