Well-Read Black Girl, edited by Glory Edim

Well-Read Black Girl started as a t-shirt given to Glory Edim by her partner. Then it became an Instragam, an on-line community, a national network of face-to-face book groups, a literary festival, and now this book, subtitled Finding Our Stories, Discovering Ourselves.

As a 68-year-old white woman, I am not exactly the book's target audience, but I totally enjoyed the essays by African American woman writers, reflecting on the books that were significant to them as young people, books in which they first felt represented or seen. The essayists include women working in a variety of genres--novels, memoir, poetry, drama; among them are recognizable names like Jesmyn Ward, Tayari Jones, Rebecca Walker, Stephanie Powell Watts, Zinzi Clemmons, Lynn Notage, and Jacquelie Woodson. The works they cite as important to them (although not always in a completely positive way) include some of the works one might expect--Beloved, The Bluest Eye, and Sula by Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou, Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston, Brown Girl, Brownstones by Paule Marshall, the poetry of Lucille Clifton and Nikki Giovanni. But there are also surprises--Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinley, and Me, Elizabeth by E.L. Konigsburg and Boy, by Roald Dahl to name two. One of the gifts of WRBG is the book list of every work mentioned by the essayists.

Another of its gifts is the inspirational writing about reading and writing. A few examples:

“Jamaica Kincaid taught me that the women I loved might not have been known to many people in the world but they were opera singers. They had beauty in their voices; great dramas were at the cruxes of their lives. And if I could catch their voices—the way they loved, the way they taught, the way they turned their faces away in pain, and how they stood in their own power—then their words on the page might become a song worth singing.”—Veronica Chambers

“Baldwin is a moral philosopher. His work does not merely describe and analyze oppression, but relentlessly asks the reader to examine their individual relationship to evil, to cruelty, bigotry, and white supremacy, and whether they are ready to change.” —Barbara Smith

“At the end of the day, the job of the Black woman writer is the same as the work of the well-read Black girl. We are to be curious and determined, committed to life and all of its many permutations. We are to look to the words of our sisters for knowledge and uplift, camaraderie and support. We are to seek beauty and find ourselves. We are to live and tell the story.”—Rebecca Walker

“So much depends on us remembering our past. We live in a country that likes to forget—likes to forget who was here before us, likes to forget who built the country, likes to forget who this country was stolen from.”—Jacqueline Woodson

I know that’s a lot of quoting, but perhaps one of these brief excerpts will inspire you to pick up this book—it’s well-worth your time. Meanwhile, I can’t help wondering where Glory Edim will take WRBG next.