Tamara Winfrey Harris

From the bestselling author of The Sisters Are Alright comes a book of personal letters written by black women to black girls to nurture healthy womanhood and sisterhood, covering topics like identity, self-love, parents, violence, grief, mental health, sex, and sexuality. "Dear #DopeBlackGirl, 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 letters from black women around the globe. In Dear Black Girl, Winfrey-Harris organizes a selection of these letters for young black girls, modeling how they can nurture their future generations as black women. 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 personal messages of alrightness 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.

GOLD MEDALIST OF FOREWORD REVIEWS' 2015 INDIEFAB AWARDS IN WOMEN'S STUDIES What's wrong with black women? Not a damned thing! The Sisters Are Alright exposes anti-black-woman propaganda and shows how real black women are pushing back against distorted cartoon versions of themselves. When African women arrived on American shores, the three-headed hydra--servile Mammy, angry Sapphire, and lascivious Jezebel--followed close behind. In the '60s, the Matriarch, the willfully unmarried baby machine leeching off the state, joined them. These stereotypes persist to this day through newspaper headlines, Sunday sermons, social media memes, cable punditry, government policies, and hit song lyrics. Emancipation may have happened more than 150 years ago, but America still won't let a sister be free from this coven of caricatures. Tamara Winfrey Harris delves into marriage, motherhood, health, sexuality, beauty, and more, taking sharp aim at pervasive stereotypes about black women. She counters warped prejudices with the straight-up truth about being a black woman in America. "We have facets like diamonds," she writes. "The trouble is the people who refuse to see us sparkling."