Award-winning novelist, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (center) is surrounded by guests at the 2015 Girls Write Now Awards. Photo Credit: Janette Pellegrino/Getty Images Entertainment/Getty Images

Girls Write Now Honors Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie; Pamela Paul; and Juju Chang

Girls Write Now, a nonprofit organization that mentors underserved young women to help them find their voices through the power of writing and community, recently honored award-winning novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie; New York Times Book Review Editor Pamela Paul; and ABC News' Emmy Award-winning Nightline anchor, Juju Chang at its highly anticipated annual fundraising and recognition event, The Girls Write Now Awards.

Photo (left to right): Activist, writer, and founder of Chime for Change, Mariane Pearl; New York Times Book Review Editor, Pamela Paul; Maya Nussbaum, Founder, Girls Write Now; ABC News Journalist and Co-Anchor, Juju Chang; and award-winning novelist, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Photo Credit: Luvon Roberson

These celebrated women writers are raising their voices and by doing so, are encouraging teen girls to do the same. The Girls Write Now Awards recognizes women "who inspire us as they write the world....who report fearlessly from the front lines around the globe, uncover stories that shed light on humanity, and prove that words have the power to effect change."

Writer-activist Mariane Pearl, founder of Chime for Change, co-hosted the awards show. 

Girls Write Now used the occasion to release this year's award-winning anthology, The Girls Write Now 2015 Anthology: Voice to Voice.

Meet Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Photo Left to Right: Girls Write Now Founder, Maya Nussbaum; award-winning novelist, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie; and What's The 411 Book Editor, Luvon Roberson. Photo Credit: Girls Write Now

Adichie’s best-selling Americanah, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, and her award-winning Half of a Yellow Sun and spell-bounding Purple Hibiscus – where we see the world of 15-year-old Kambili --are among her many acclaimed works. 

I was pleased, indeed, to find in the goody bag Adichie’s We Should All Be Feminists, her eloquent essay, adapted from the TEDx talk she delivered in 2012 and sampled in Beyonce’s 2013 song “Flawless.”

Photo Credit: Luvon Roberson

 Don’t worry about being likable. Tell your story.— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Girls Write Now Awards Groundbreaker honoree

At the Awards ceremony, we were treated to Adichie’s truth-telling voice, when she urged girls and women to tell their authentic stories as writers rather than through the lens of likeability.  

Watch Chimamanda Ngozo Adichie deliver her speech in this video:

“And, so what I want to say to the young girls is: Forget about likeability. If you start off thinking about being likeable, you’re not going to tell your story honestly, because you’re going to be so concerned with not offending. And, that’s going to ruin your story.”

New York Times Book Review Editor, Pamela Paul

Girls need to see themselves as storytellers whose stories deserve to be heard. --Pamela Paul, Girls Write Now Awards Gamechanger honoree

In 2013, Paul became the first woman to be named Editor of The New York Times Book Review.

Referring to her mother’s professional background as an advertising copywriter in New York City, Paul told the more than 200 people gathered “…so I grew up knowing that  stories by girls and girls’ telling stories was important, and it was natural that we should tell them.” 

Paul also gave a nod to her 10-year-old daughter’s self-narrating, story-telling friends, praising the young girls “…I was happy to hear it, because these girls, they’re storytellers and they see their voices as something that’s worth being heard.” 

Watch Pamela Paul’s full remarks in this video:

ABC News Journalist and Co-Anchor, Juju Chang

We also tell stories that spark anger, that make you feel injustice. When we do those stories about the death of young black men in police custody. … we’re shedding light on a story, that’s not a happy story…but one that needs to be told.—Juju Chang, Girls Write Now Awards Trailblazer honoree

“This is an organization about teaching girls to tell their stories.” That’s how Chang said Kerry Smith, Girls Write Now Board member and Senior Vice President of ABC News, “hooked” her on Girls Write Now.  

Chang, an Emmy Award-winning co-anchor of ABC News Nightline, has reported on news-breaking stories like Superstorm Sandy; the mass shootings in Newtown, CT; and the California wildfires.  Of her two Gracie awards, one was for her ABC News 20/20 story on gender equality in the sciences. 

View Juju Chang’s acceptance speech in this video: 

Girls Write Now mentee Thasfia Chowdhury co-hosted the awards event and mentee Rachel Zhao and her mentor Nina Agrawal read from their works. Agrawal’s and Zhao’s stories are published in The Girls Write Now 2015 Anthology; 

Sightings of Girl Write Now Mentors, Mentees, & Authors  

Girls Write Now mentors are professional writers and digital media makers – from a broad array of industries and settings.  Among the mentors and mentees I caught sight of at the Awards event: longtime mentor and College Prep volunteer Josleen Wilson and former mentee and 2015 Dickinson College graduate Brittany Barker; mentor Joann Smith and mentee Calayah Heron; mentor K. T. Billey; and mentee Bre-Ann Newsome; mentor Vivian Conan and mentee Rumer LeGendre; mentee Thasfia Satterie; and former mentee and Youth Board co-chair Natalia Vargas-Caba, who is now a college student. Former mentor, literary agent, and LaGuardia Community College professor Caron Knauer spoke fondly of her former 2004 - 2006 mentee Anna Witiuk, with whom she keeps in touch.

Former mentee and 2015 Dickinson College graduate, Brittany Barker; and College Prep volunteer Josleen Wilson. Photo Credit: Luvon Roberson 

I was also able to chat briefly with Farai Chideya, cultural and political TV commentator, NYU professor, and author (Kiss the Sky, among other works ), and with authors Nana Brew-Hammond  (Powder Necklace),  Bridgett M. Davis (Into the Go-Slow), and Victoria Brown (Minding Ben/Grace in the City).

Farai Chideya, NYU professor, author, and cultural and political TV commentator (center) with friends at the Girls Write Now Awards. Photo Credit: Luvon Roberson

Want to Help Teen Girls Write the World?

Maya Nussbaum founded Girls Write Now 17 years ago, when she was only 21 years old and a senior, majoring in creative writing, at Columbia University. Girls Write Now is New York's first and only writing and mentoring organization for girls, and one of the nation's top after school programs as distinguished twice by the White House. It has served more than 5,000 high school teen girls, 94% are girls of color, and 100% of its seniors go on to college. To learn more about Girls Write Now, listen to Maya Nussbaum on the mentor-mentee relationship and college readiness:

To volunteer as a Girls Write Now mentor, visit: www.girlswritenow.org  

To learn more about Chime for Change, visit: www.chimeforchange.org

Provoking Justice: When Your Neighbor Calls the Cops. When Your Father Gives Your Mother a Drug. Two Samplings of Their Poetry

On this last day of April: National Poetry Month, I'm forced to sort out my response to a reading held by two provocative poets at Barnard College, in February, two months ago.

I arrive early – to get a good seat in Held Lecture Hall at Barnard College. Acclaimed poets Claudia Rankine and Robert Hass will be reading before an audience of students, faculty, local community residents, academics, poets, and anyone else, as part of the Writers at Barnard series, which is open to the public. The space fills rather quickly, soon swelling to a full house.

I could point out that the introductions delivered -- to the series by Saskia Hamilton, Director, Women Poets at Barnard, and to the poets by Christopher Baswell, professor of English, and Mary Gordon, best-selling author of four novels and professor of English and Writing -- are key to framing my high expectations of the evening. And, referring to Robert Hass in her opening remarks, Rankine says, "He's the one who taught me to think on the page."

Yet, as thoughtful as these are, I am unprepared for the eruptive force of these two poets' reading of their works. They provoke. They disturb. They trouble the waters of injustice.

A confession: I often find poetry inaccessible and must be nudged – if not pushed– to discover it. I needed no such prod once Rankine and Hass begin to read samplings of their poems. Perhaps it is their voices, the rhythm, cadence, the pitch. But, just as with the evening's introductions, while their voices are quite exceptional in these ways, that alone cannot account for my response. Instead, I think it was their picking at the everyday realities of violence and trauma like one picks at a scab or the broken strings of a guitar.

As they read, certainly their voices and words washed over me as only poetic voices can. But it is to their truths I surrendered.

Closing Lines...

When Your Neighbor Calls the Cops.
Two works from the sampling read by the poets that evening are especially powerful and disruptive. Each poet draws from real-life experience in both pieces.

Claudia Rankine signing copies of CITIZEN: An American Lyric at the Writers at Barnard Series. Photo Credit: Luvon Roberson

Listen to this interview in which Rankine reads from the piece, included in her latest book, CITIZEN: AN AMERICAN LYRIC and which begins with such foreboding:

"August 18, 2014

You and your partner go to see the film The House We Live In. You ask a friend to pick up your child from school. On your way home your phone rings. Your neighbor tells you he is standing at his window watching a menacing black guy casing both your homes. The guy is walking back and forth talking to himself and seems disturbed.

You tell your neighbor that your friend, whom he has met, is babysitting. He says, no, it's not him. He's met your friend and this isn't that nice young man. Anyway, he wants you to know, he's called the police."

Listen to Rankine's interview: 

When Your Father Gives Your Mother a Drug.

Robert Hass, professor, poet, and author, signing copies of his work at the Writers at Barnard series

Hass pulls away the covers in his family, laying bare the deadly dynamics of roles in his poem, The World As Will and Presentation, among the collection, Time and Materials. Poems 1997-2005. The poem's opening lines are wrenching:

"When I was a child my father every morning –
Some mornings, for a time, when I was ten or so,
My father gave my mother a drug called antabuse.
It makes you sick if you drink alcohol.
They were little yellow pills. He ground them
In a glass, dissolved them in water, handed her
The glass and watched her closely while she drank.
It was the late nineteen forties, a time,
A social world, in which the men got up
And went to work, leaving the women with the children.
His wink at me was a nineteen-forties wink."
Listen to Hass's reading: 

Author Carla Kaplan and Historian and Artist, Nell Painter, in conversation about Miss Anne in Harlem and who is white in the history of white people

A conversation being held at New York Public Library between author Carla Kaplan and historian and artist Nell Painter was one I had to listen in on, even if it meant riding on the subway after 8pm, when the talk concluded. Kaplan, a professor of English at Northeastern University, is the author of Miss Anne in Harlem: The White Women of the Black Renaissance (Harper Collins, 2013). Nell Painter, Professor Emeritus of History at Princeton University, is the author of The History of White People (W.W. Norton & Company, 2010). I was already anticipating their talk, as I walked from the #1 stop at 42nd Street, cutting through Bryant Park so I could admire the beauty of NYPL set behind flowering paths, water fountains, and that rare sight -- New Yorkers at leisure.

What might the organizers of this NYPL conversation be inviting us to consider or, perhaps, reconsider?

Indeed, as you can hear in this audio clip, their conversation is a free-flowing, even ebullient one that these two distinguished academics are clearly enjoying as they toss out ideas and history about women, jazz, money in the arts, 1920s Harlem, glitterati, African-Americans in the arts and as arbiters of American culture, who is white in the history of white people, and the interplay of these with so many other topics.

In the midst of their exciting exchange of words and ideas, I was struck by Kaplan's saying,

"I wanted to tell stories... not just to academics. I wanted to write a book that my mother's book club would read.... I wanted that story to be dialogic. So, I wanted the women I wrote about in the book to be in dialogue with the black activists, artists, writers, intellectuals, philanthropists, who they were seeking to collaborate with. ... I was actually trying to resurrect their voices..."

I think often of Kaplan's wish that book clubs – regular folk -- not only academics, can spark conversation through the women's voices they find in her book.

Carla Kaplan, author, Miss Anne in Harlem. Photo Credit: Robin Hultgren

Two of my book clubs have indeed read Miss Anne in Harlem.

Bookmark by Burtt Brown, Riverside Book Club, Miss Anne in Harlem. Photo Credit: Luvon Roberson

And, I am pleased to note that, according to the review in The New York Times, Painter's The History of White People "... has much to teach everyone, including whiteness experts, but it is accessible and breezy..." (I'm not an academic. Is that why the characterization of such experts makes me cringe?).

The New York Times review also points to Painter's book, offering this lens:

"Some ancient descriptions did note color, as when the ancient Greeks recognized that their 'barbaric' northern neighbors, Scythians and Celts, had lighter skin than Greeks considered normal. Most ancient peoples defined population differences culturally, not physically, and often regarded lighter people as less civilized. Centuries later, European travel writers regarded the light-skinned Circassians, a k a [also known as] Caucasians, as people best fit only for slavery, yet at the same time labeled Circassian slave women the epitome of beauty." 

I appreciate -- even when I cannot agree with -- how both Painter and Kaplan re-frame histories we all believe we know or simply believe in, without knowing. Kaplan frames Miss Anne in Harlem as her endeavor to tell the women's stories through their eyes and voices. Too often, the stories of African-Americans – and of women – are told solely through the lens of others. For quite some time, I've believed there is a dynamism and energy in speaking, listening to, and hearing my voice and that of others.

On the ride back home on the subway that evening, I wasn't able to find a seat on the jam-packed #1 train. For most of the ride I stood, trapped by strangers' bodies and smells, all my senses on full-alert. Then, as my body rocked and listed with other bodies in the subway car, I realized: If, as a woman and African-American, I were not too often denied access to that dynamism and power, would I have been so eager to listen in on the conversation between Painter and Kaplan? And, why am I just as resistant in some ways to their framing of the conversation?

Closing Lines...

Carla Kaplan observes that "Miss Anne/Ann," is a derisive reference to white women, well-known by African-Americans but little known among whites. In framing the social currency of "Miss Anne/Ann" most recently, Kaplan points to its use in "The Nation" blog by Kimberle Crenshaw, a professor of law at UCLA and Columbia Law School; a founder of Critical Race Theory and a co-founder of the think tank, the African American Policy Forum.

Nell Irvin Painter photo by Robin Holland

When New Yorkers Tell Their Stories: From Top Hats & Bonnets to Kooky & Outrageous

When I was a child, I thought Easter was one day: Easter Sunday, when I was decked out gloriously with new dress, shoes, and hat. Such finery, of course, was to be worn only once -- on that special Easter day. As with so many things in life, I've come to understand Easter as being more expansive. Indeed, rather than being limited to only one day, Easter is a season. In the liturgical calendar, the season of Easter lasts seven Sundays, beginning on Easter Sunday and spanning to the Day of Pentecost. That adds up to 50 days of Easter!

Of course, we humans have found ways to express not only our faith or spiritual traditions of Easter, but also to express our joy and playfulness as Spring returns. Enter, the Easter Parade!

After a New York winter that was especially challenging , seeming never to end, we may have been even more excited than usual to shed our protective, multiple layers of clothing. And, what better way to show off our bright new Spring outfits -- topped off with spectacular bonnets and sophisticated top hats -- than to strut down Fifth Avenue in the Easter Parade on Easter Sunday? Perhaps strutting our finery in procession for all to see and admire is a way we choose to tell our story of joy – even exuberance – about Spring's arrival, at long last!

In my new, more expansive view, perhaps each of us becomes the author of our Spring or Easter or whatever story we choose to tell, as we gather with thousands of other "storytellers" in the Easter Parade. As you can see, even the most outlandish hat-creations are part of the story. I'm guessing that it's just these kind of broad-ranging, diverse expressions I find in the procession every year that keep me coming back.

At about 11:00 am or so, a group of friends and I head to 49th Street & Fifth Avenue, decked out in our bonnets. I make certain to look for Fred Moody, a gifted photographer, who's always in front of St. Patrick's Cathedral at about that time. This year, at 53rd Street & Fifth Avenue, TheRoot.com captured my bonnet along with Marie Pierre; Lisa McFadden; Twila Perry; Paula Pelliccia and her fashion designer daughter, Lisette Ffolkes, who works for Tracy Reese; and many others. It's taken us about an hour to walk four blocks!

Marie Pierre at the Easter Parade on New York City's Fifth Avenue  Photo credit: Derrick Davis for The Root

Lisa McFadden at the Easter Parade on New York City's Fifth Avenue  Photo credit: Derrick Davis for The Root

Twila Perry at the Easter Parade on Fifth Avenue in New York City  Photo credit: Derrick Davis for The Root

Paula Pelliccia and her daughter, fashion designer, Lisette Ffolkes. Photo credit: Derrick Davis for The Root

Lana Turner, Harlem real estate broker & fashion-setter, at  NYC's  2015 Easter Parade on Fifth Avenue. Photo Credit: T. Perry

As my friends and I slowly make our way to the Parade's end at 57th Street & Fifth Avenue, we're stopped dozens more times by other Easter paraders – or professional photographers -- who want to take our photo. However, we're not merely subjects; we are active participants in these "stories," as we also ask even more folks to pose so we can capture their Easter creativity with our cameras and smartphones.

Indeed, there's no such thing as an on-looker, because even those who aren't decked out in Easter bonnets are part of the Fifth Avenue procession. Maybe you'll consider this pageantry as narrative. Maybe you'll join in next year's Easter Parade on "The Avenue"!

Each month, I’ll share images of books and authors that I come upon in unexpected places. It’s all to inspire you to experience, as if for the first time, the wonder of books and their creators.