Tamara Winfrey Harris - "Dear Black Girl: Letters from Your Sisters on Stepping into Your Power"

Tamara Winfrey Harris will discuss Dear Black Girl: Letters from Your Sisters on Stepping into Your Power.

Presented in partnership with Centering Sisters

Virtual event

REGISTER HERE

About the book: “Dear Dope Black Girl, You don’t know me, but I know you. I know you because I am you! We are magic, light, and stars in the universe.” So begins a letter that Tamara Winfrey Harris received as part of her Letters to Black Girls project, where she asked black women to write honest, open, and inspiring letters of support to young black girls aged thirteen to twenty-one. Her call went viral, resulting in a hundred personal letters from black women around the globe that cover topics such as identity, self-love, parents, violence, grief, mental health, sex, and sexuality.

In Dear Black Girl, Winfrey Harris organizes a selection of these letters, providing “a balm for the wounds of anti-black-girlness” and modeling how black women can nurture future generations. Each chapter ends with a prompt encouraging girls to write a letter to themselves, teaching the art of self-love and self-nurturing. Winfrey Harris’s The Sisters Are Alright explores how black women must often fight and stumble their way into alrightness after adulthood. Dear Black Girl continues this work by delivering pro-black, feminist, LGBTQ+ positive, and body positive messages for black women-to-be–and for the girl who still lives inside every black woman who still needs reminding sometimes that she is alright.

About the author: Tamara Winfrey Harris is a writer who specializes in the intersection race and gender with politics, pop culture and current events. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Cosmopolitan, The Los Angeles Times and other outlets. Tamara’s first book, The Sisters Are Alright: Changing the Broken Narrative of Black Women in America was published by Berrett-Koehler Publishers in 2015 and called “a myth-busting portrait of Black women in America” by The Washington Post. The book won the Phillis Wheatley Award, IndieFab Award, Independent Publishers Living Now Award and the IPPY Award. A native of Gary, IN, Tamara graduated with a BA degree from the Greenlee School of Journalism at Iowa State University and is a proud member of Alpha Kappa Alpha, Sorority, Inc.