This International Women’s Day, the ultimate present arrived in my mailbox, gifted by my favorite person: me! It was a brand-spanking-new, hardcover edition of my new favorite coffee-table book, Black Girls Rock! Owning Our Magic. Rocking Our Truth.
The book is a compilation of first person essays, insights and affirmations from a multigenerational cross section of notable black women, including Maxine Waters, Mary J. Blige, Melissa Harris Perry, Danai Gurira and Rihanna—with a foreword by our forever first lady, Michelle Obama.
For the book’s author and editor, celebrity DJ and Black Girls Rock! founder Beverly Bond, it was also a labor of profound love for black women and our legacy, as she told The Glow Up:
I think that the book is a great way to permanently keep something in the world that can go from generation to generation and give you a variety of experiences from women who are scholars; women who are bosses; women who are top entertainers; women who are disability-rights advocates. We have so many different stories in this book about so many of our experiences.
The stunning and always straightforward Bond also sat down with The Glow Up’s video team to talk about how Black Girls Rock! came to be and why having our own platforms, media and space to tell our stories is so vital, especially to future generations—you can watch above.
And while there are 69 incredible black women featured in her new book, Bond—who also holds the trademark to “Black Girl Magic”—let us know that there’s still plenty more ground she plans to cover in letting the world know that black girls do indeed rock: “You know, there’s probably a million more women that I would want to put in this book if I could, so I may have to do volumes.”