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On Womanhood and Belonging in the Age of Black Girl Magic
by Kenya Hunt
In the vein of Roxane Gay's Bad Feminist and Issa Rae's The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl, but wholly its own, a provocative, humorous, and, at times, heartbreaking collection of essays on what it means to be black, a woman, a mother, and a global citizen in today's ever-changing world.
Black women have never been more visible or more publicly celebrated than they are now. But for every new milestone, every magazine cover, every box office record smashed, every new face elected to public office, the reality of everyday life for black women remains a complex, conflicted, contradiction-laden experience.
An American journalist who has been living and working in London for a decade, Kenya Hunt has made a career of distilling moments, movements, and cultural moods into words. Her work takes the difficult and the indefinable and makes it accessible; it is razor sharp cultural observation threaded through evocative and relatable stories.
Girl Gurl Grrrl both illuminates our current cultural moment and transcends it. Hunt captures the zeitgeist while also creating a timeless celebration of womanhood, of blackness, and the possibilities they both contain. She blends the popular and the personal, the frivolous and the momentous in a collection that truly reflects what it is to be living and thriving as a black woman today.
"Taken together, the essays form a chorus of Black diasporic voices across continents, covering the politics of Black hair, self-acceptance and White beauty standards, activism, motherhood, 'the abysmally poor maternal health outcomes of Black women in the US,' and more...A powerful collection that is very much of the present moment of resistance but will also endure." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Hunt, deputy editor of the fashion magazine Grazia UK, debuts with a rich collection of personal essays about her life and career...Hunt's work will broaden perspectives and inspire readers." - Publishers Weekly
"This thought-provoking collection of ruminations from Black women on how they thrive and struggle in the complex world today is particularly relevant to this moment but will remain an important text for years to come." - Library Journal
"Kenya Hunt, the award-winning American journalist in London, provocatively threads cultural observations through relatable stories that illuminate our current cultural moment while transcending it." - Refinery 29
"Powerful, intelligent and vital – one of the year's must-reads." - Elle
"GIRL is an essential, vital and urgent exploration of Black womanhood, that should be on everyone's reading list. Every page is meaningful and a call for empathy, hope and change. There is such power in the stories that are told, from Kenya's own experience – as a mother, as a journalist, as an American in London, to Ebele Okobi's essay on the unspeakable loss of a brother to police brutality. If any book should enrich – and disrupt – your life, let it be this." - Harper's Bazaar
"From its title and construction to its rhythms and its rigor, GIRL GURL GRRRL is a radical and magical diasporic curation of love for Black dialect, Black freedom, Black cool, Black culture, Black joy, and mostly--and specifically--Black women." - Damon Young, author of What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Blacker
This information about Girl Gurl Grrrl was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Kenya Hunt is the Fashion Director of Grazia UK. Her career spans working for some of the media world's most influential women's titles on both sides of the Atlantic from her post-graduate days as an Assistant Editor at the seminal magazine, Jane, to her years as Deputy Editor of ELLE UK. Her writing has appeared in the Guardian, the Evening Standard, Vogue and other publications. And she has made a number of appearances on BBC Woman's Hour, Sky News and more. An American based in England, she lives south of the river in London with her husband and two sons.
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