Honoring the Power and Progress of Black Women

The United States is observing Black History Month all February with stories, discussions, celebrations and more honoring the lives and works of black people as we continue the fight for equality—and the success, strength, and talent of black women is often front and center. Here are a few articles that caught our eye this week.

How This Digital Influencer Is Adding More Seats to the Table, from Forbes—“My hope is that eventually there are many more women of color who can create their own events and get consulting gigs with these companies. You can’t make a change if you aren’t in the rooms where decisions are being made.”

Meet ‘Black Girl Magic,’ the 19 African-American Women Elected As Judges in Texas, from NPR—“This cycle, Harris County also saw record numbers of Hispanic-American, Asian-American and LGBT candidates. And the more such candidates win, the more it encourages younger people of diverse backgrounds to believe they can do the same.”

Black Women Are Making a Name for Themselves As Tech Entrepreneurs, from USA Today—“We’re in a moment right now, black women, black women founders, Latinx women founders—we’re in a moment where people care. Our goal at digitalundivided is to turn that moment into a movement.”

100+ Books by Black Women That Should Be Essential Reading for Everyone, from PopSugar—“Diverse literature is more essential than ever in today's current climate. Books are some of the best tools for developing tolerance and empathy, and few books are as rich and nuanced as those penned by black women.”

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Turning Michelle Obama’s ‘Becoming’ Into a Class Curriculum for Black Girls

Michelle Obama’s role in inspiring and influencing women and girls—especially black women and girls—can hardly be overstated. Now Lauren Christine Mims, who works to correct obstacles and inequalities faced by black girls and explores “how social environments influence how Black girls learn, interact, and define their identities in early adolescence” according to her website, is turning Obama's bestseller Becoming into an affirming, validating curriculum to support black girls. From representation to personal growth, the curriculum will nurture black girls in their learning and development. It will also include discussions and films featuring black girls in leading roles. Click through to read the full article on Black Enterprise, and see the syllabus here.

by Kandia Johnson

Lauren Christine Mims is a former assistant director of the White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for African Americans and a Ph.D. candidate in Educational Psychology at the University of Virginia. She’s also one of the many women inspired by Michelle Obama’s Becoming, a New York Times best-selling book that sold more than 1.4 million copies within the first seven days of its release. Now, Mims is turning Obama’s book into a curriculum for black girls to further their learning and development.

“Reading Becoming was like sitting on the couch with your best friend and having one of those soulful conversations about life,” said Mims.

“Reading about how Michelle Obama felt unchallenged in elementary school, teased for the way she spoke, and noticed a difference in how she was perceived during adolescence was affirming.”

Mims hopes the Becoming curriculum will make space for black girls to thrive in a world that often seems to try and deny their humanity. As part of her doctoral research at the University of Virginia, Mims explores what it means to be a young, gifted, black girl in school.

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Image credit: Black Enterprise

27 Nonfiction Books By Women Everyone Should Read This Year

huffingtonpost.com - New year, new books. At least, that’s what we wrote back in December, when we were just starting to add titles to our 2017 reading lists. Now that we’re nine days into the new year, our to-read list has only grown. And while our first book preview was filled with all the fiction you could handle, we wanted to take a moment to talk about the incredible wave of nonfiction we’re expecting this year, too.

Particularly, we’re talking about nonfiction from women authors ― because a single year that includes memoir and essay collection releases from the likes of Roxane Gay, Patricia Lockwood, Joan Didion, Yiyun Li, Mary Gaitskill, Samantha Irby and Camille Paglia is worth celebrating.

Behold: 27 nonfiction books by women everyone should read this year.

For many of us working full time in urban environments, the prospect of studying mushrooms or catching fireflies seems like a faraway fantasy. In 2012, writer Kyo Maclear was inspired by a musician she met who had fallen in love with birds ― one of those rare natural spectacles readily available in cityscapes. The author spent the year devoted to the winged things, observing them and documenting the changes she underwent along the way. Birds Art Life chronicles her journey, exploring the many shapes passion can take, and the many spaces natural beauty can occupy. ― Priscilla Frank

Girl behind #1000BlackGirlBooks gets dream job

We've shared before about Marley Dias, the New Jersey middle-school student who saw a dearth of books representing young black girls and decided to do something about it. She's collected thousands of books so far featuring black female protagonists—far exceeding even her own ambitious goal. And now, Dias has been named an editor-in-residence for Elle.com, complete with Marley Mag, a publication inspired and spearheaded by Dias. We're so excited to see where this new opportunity leads: for Dias as well as for black girls and others everywhere who will now discover the strength, diversity, complexity, intelligence, joy, depth and more that black girls bring to books—and the world.

nj.com - When Marley Dias started her #1000BlackGirlBooks social media campaign to collect books featuring black girls as main characters, she didn't expect to exceed her goal of a thousand books.

Dias, an Essex County middle-schooler, came up with the campaign last year after becoming frustrated with the lack of black, female main characters in books she had to read for school, the ones filled with "white boys and their dogs."

But the effort drew a surplus of books — more than 7,000 so far — and a significant amount of attention from national media. Marley wound up a guest on "The Ellen DeGeneres Show" and later got to meet Oprah Winfrey and Michelle Obama.

Now the 11-year-old from West Orange has been made an editor-in-residence for Elle.com, which on Monday launched Marley Mag, a zine of her very own.

"When you see a character you can connect with, if they learn a specific lesson, you're more likely to apply that to your life," Dias told NJ Advance Media in January when talking about the impetus behind her book campaign. Dias, then a sixth grader at Thomas A. Edison Middle School, said her ultimate goal was to edit her own pop culture and lifestyle magazine.

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Too much good stuff: A list of lists for International Women's Day

There is way too much information about women—the dangers we still face, economic inequality, the huge strides women have made over the years, inspirational stories about everyday women, how to help the women in your life—to cover in one day or even during Women's History Month. It can seem overwhelming. Sometimes, an overview is just the thing needed to find your cause and join the fight. So for a small taste, here are a few lists you might want to peruse by news sources, nonprofits and amazing organizations that join us in our fight for gender equality. Prepare to be stunned, educated and inspired.

5 Ways to Celebrate International Women’s Day 2016

From joining the worldwide conversation to a call for justice to making a Pledge for Parity, The Nobel Women’s Initiative has ways you can celebrate and join in advocating for women right now.

16 Courageous Women Standing Up to Violence

An amazing collection of courageous women addressing violence and its underlying causes, and helping people heal.

5 women you've never heard of who changed the world

OK, so you might have heard of some of these women, but this list of women featured at the World Economic Forum will teach everyone a few new facts, including stories of a politician, an actress, and activists and trailblazers way ahead of their time.

14 Feminist Quotes For Women's History Month 2016

Bustle rounded up some wise words from Malala Yousafzai, Gloria Steinem, Beyoncé and other ladies you may recognize (as well as some voices who might be new to you!), so head over for some inspiration, and share your own favorite women-empowering words with us!

40 New Books for Women’s History Month

The insightful folks at A Mighty Girl have an amazing collection of books about girls and women for young readers--boys as well as girls. Picture books, chapter books, young adult, biographies are all featured. (Adults can probably learn a thing or two as well!)

International Women's Day 2016: 10 best feminist books

Looking for books written primarily for adults? The Independent has you covered with this list of feminist books, from classics to new books. Get reading!

11 Must-Read Biographies About Incredible Women

One more list of books. Because we can't ever get enough of women's stories. This list from The Huffington Post is as diverse as it is intriguing.

Can you name 5 women artists?

In the United States, only 5 percent of work on museum walls is by women. Can you even name five female artists? To highlight this inequity and promote women artists, the National Museum of Women in the Arts launched the social media campaign #5womenartists. If you're falling a little short or even if you're not, check out this article from The Getty profiling five talented women artists.

This is just a beginning—we haven't even covered injustices and violence women face worldwide, women's role in easing global challenges like climate change and hunger, how women's success in the boardroom translates to more powerful companies, and much more—but it's a start. Let us know what inspires you this International Women's Day, come back as we continue the conversation on investing in women, and keep fighting for gender parity!

NPR Interviews Young Visionary Behind #1000BlackGirlBooks

Marley Dias loves to read. But the New Jersey 11-year-old—who, among other things, has traveled to Ghana to help feed orphans and received a grant from Disney—has made it her latest passion to collect children's books featuring black female protagonists so she and other students can have role models in fiction that include people like themselves.The project, #1000BlackGirlBooks, saw its beginning when Dias commented to her mother that she was "sick of reading about white boys and dogs." Determined to show that there are wonderful black girl protagonists—and to introduce the books to schools and show that reading is enhanced by including diverse perspectives—Dias set out to collect 1,000 such books by the beginning of February. She's currently at 4,000 books and counting.

Dias spoke with NPR's Morning Edition about her effort and the importance of students being able to identify with protagonists.

"I think it's important in general for kids to be reading books with diversity. When you read about a character that you can connect with, you'll remember the things that they learned, so if I like hair bows, and the character I'm reading about likes hair bows; I'll remember what he or she learned in that book because I have something in common with them," Dias told Morning Edition's David Greene.

Read an excerpt and listen to the interview, and click through to check out the rest of the article, including book recommendations from Dias.

NPR Ed - (Excerpt) Black girls, like Marley, were almost never the main character.

What she was noticing is actually a much bigger issue: Fewer than 10 percent of children's books released in 2015 had a black person as the main character, according to a yearly analysis by the Cooperative Children's Book Center at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. And while the number of children's books about minorities has increased in the past 20 years, many classroom libraries have older books.

Last fall, Marley decided to do something about it. She set a goal of collecting 1,000 books about black girls by the beginning of February, and #1000blackgirlbooks was born.

Roxane Gay and Rebecca Traister Talk Sex, Female Friendship, and What It Means to be Single Now

Roxane Gay; author of An Untamed State (2014), the essay collection Bad Feminist (2014), and Hunger (coming this year); spoke with journalist Rebecca Traister to mark the release of her book All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation. Traister interviewed dozens of women from all over the United States for her book, painting a diverse and nuanced picture about how marriage has changed in recent decades for women.  Gay interviews Traister about her new book; changing trends, queer issues, gender dynamics, how the stigma of being single is changing and more. Traister and Gay discuss being married as it's shaped by choice, race, and class; women's identity as married or single people; and what marriage means to women today—and to Traister.

“Living singly in your twenties and thirties—and beyond—isn't a tryout for life: It is real life,” Traister says.

Read the introduction here, and click through to Elle.com to read the interview.

elle.com - In Beyoncé's ring finger-wagging 2008 anthem, "Single Ladies," she celebrates independent women who would rather be single than settle. In Rebecca Traister's new book, All the Single Ladies (Simon & Schuster), which borrows both the refrain and the feminist spirit of that song, she chronicles the rise of unmarried women in America and the different people we're becoming because of it. "For young women, for the first time, it is as normal to be unmarried as it is to be married, even if it doesn't always feel that way," Traister writes, noting that there were 3.9 million more single adult women in 2014 than there were in 2010. In 1960, 59 percent of American adults between 18 and and 29 were married; in 2011, it was just 20 percent. The book is wonderfully inclusive, examining single women from all walks of life—working-, middle-, and upper-class women; women of color and white women; queer and straight ones.

Traister has built a reputation as one of America's preeminent feminist voices through her work for Salon, the New Republic, ELLE (where she is a longtime contributing editor), and now New York magazine. Her first book, Big Girls Don't Cry, examined the 2008 presidential election and its cultural and political consequences via the cycle's cast of female power players, including women voters, Hillary Clinton, and Sarah Palin. With All the Single Ladies, she brings her trademark intelligence and wit to bear, interspersing her own experiences and observations with dozens of interviews with women all over the country, plus historical context, from so-called Boston marriages (the nineteenth-century name for women who lived together) and the Brontë sisters to Murphy Brown and Sex and the City.

Visit Elle.com to read Roxane Gay's interview with Rebecca Traister. 

Be a Part of the Smartest New Book Club, #WLClub

A movement that began on Twitter and has since expanded to Google groups, Instagram, and posts all over social media; writer Rachel Syme's book club promoting books about women, by women has taken off, spreading around the Internet and world. Read about the club and movement in this article by Amy Poehler's Smart Girls. Which biography of an extraordinary woman would you like to add to the list?  amysmartgirls.com - Lately in my Twitter feed I keep seeing the hashtag #wlclub and after a few days of dismissing it, curiosity finally won out and I clicked. What does it stand for? Women’s Lives Club—a virtual book club with participants all from all over the world. February’s book is Janet Malcolm’s The Silent Woman, a biography of Sylvia Plath.

It’s the brainchild of prolific writer Rachel Syme, where anyone interested in participating can partake in reading a biography of a notable woman each month. I tracked Smart Girl Rachel Syme down via Twitter and asked her all about how this club came to be.

“The funny thing was, I was just on Twitter and I was wasting time as one tends to do. I was writing about paying attention to women’s lives in general, and really casually in a tweet storm, I asked if I were to start a monthly book club about women’s lives, would anyone do it.”

That tweet launched a thousand readers. Or at the very least just over four hundred (the group’s total at last count), but it’s still growing every day. Rachel started a Google group, asking for interested people to email her to be added. And how do the books get chosen? Everyone makes suggestions and Rachel puts the ones that are repeatedly named up to a vote. Next month’s pick, Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Thurston by Valerie Boyd, won by a landslide.

Read the rest here.