Dear Black Girl: Letters from Your Sisters on Stepping Into Your Power

"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 39 letters from black women to young black girls, modeling how they can nurture healthy womanhood, sisterhood, and their future generations as black women. The letters cover the topics of identity, self-love, relationships, career, poverty, assault, teen motherhood, incarceration, mental health, and sex, and 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.