We were thrilled to host two of the dopest and most talented creators working today, Shayla Lawson and Phoebe Robinson (co-host of 2 Dope Queens with Jessica Williams) to celebrate the release of Shayla’s new essay collection, This Is Major: Notes on Diana Ross, Dark Girls, and Being Dope. The book is a unique mix of Shayla’s personal stories, pop culture observations, and insights into politics and history, and sheds fascinating light on the many ways Black women and girls have influenced mainstream culture—from their style, to their language, and even their art—and how that mainstream culture has ultimately shortchanged them.
Featured Books
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This Is Major: Notes on Diana Ross, Dark Girls, and Being Dope
By Shayla Lawson
Published by Harper Perennial
Shayla Lawson is major. You don’t know who she is. Yet. But that’s okay. She is on a mission to move black girls like herself from best supporting actress to a starring role in the major narrative. Whether she’s taking on workplace microaggressions or upending racist stereotypes about her home state of Kentucky, she looks for the side of the story that isn’t always told, the places where the voices of black girls haven’t been heard.
The essays in This is Major ask questions like: Why are black women invisible to AI? What is “black girl magic”? Or: Am I one viral tweet away from becoming Twitter famous? And: How much magic does it take to land a Tinder date?
With a unique mix of personal stories, pop culture observations, and insights into politics and history, Lawson sheds light on these questions, as well as the many ways black women and girls have influenced mainstream culture–from their style, to their language, and even their art–and how “major” they really are.
Timely, enlightening, and wickedly sharp, This Is Major places black women at the center–no longer silenced, no longer the minority.
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Everything's Trash, But It's Okay
By Phoebe Robinson
Published by Plume Books
Written in her trademark unfiltered and witty style, Robinson’s latest collection is a call to arms. Outfitted with on-point pop culture references, these essays tackle a wide range of topics: giving feminism a tough-love talk on intersectionality, telling society’s beauty standards to kick rocks, and calling foul on our culture’s obsession with work. Robinson also gets personal, exploring money problems she’s hidden from her parents, how dating is mainly a warmed-over bowl of hot mess, and definitely most important, meeting Bono not once, but twice. She’s struggled with being a woman with a political mind and a woman with an ever-changing jeans size. She knows about trash because she sees it every day–and because she’s seen roughly one hundred thousand hours of reality TV and zero hours of Schindler’s List.
With the intimate voice of a new best friend, Everything’s Trash, But It’s Okay is a candid perspective for a generation that has had the rug pulled out from under it too many times to count.
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