Six portrayals of Black girlhood in fiction

Kai Harris is a writer and educator from Detroit, Michigan, who uses her voice to uplift the Black community through realistic fiction centered on the Black experience. Her work has appeared in Guernica, Kweli Journal, Longform, and the Killens Review, amongst others. In addition to fiction, Harris has published poetry, personal essays, and peer-reviewed academic articles on topics related to Black girlhood and womanhood, the slave narrative genre, motherhood, and Black identity. A graduate of Western Michigan University’s PhD program, Harris was the recipient of the university’s Gwen Frostic Creative Writing Award in Fiction for her short story, “While We Live.” Harris now lives in the Bay Area with her husband, three daughters, and dog Tabasco, where she is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Santa Clara University.

Harris's new novel is What the Fireflies Knew.

At Lit Hub she tagged six classic books that depict Black girlhood, including:

Angie Thomas, The Hate U Give

Based on the Black Lives Matter movement, Angie Thomas’s The Hate U Give tells the story of 16-year-old Starr, who lives her life as a balancing act between two worlds. This balance is shaken when she witnesses the fatal shooting of her unarmed childhood best friend at the hands of a police officer. Though centered around this tragedy, The Hate U Give stands true to the legacy of Black girlhood fiction by giving Starr an authentic voice, allowing her to tell her own story in her own way. When I read this book, two things stood out to me. First: how easy it was for me to understand Starr’s perspective, because it felt so much like my own.

The second thing that stood out to me was how much my work-in-progress was like The Hate U Give. Again, I found so many connections between the stories I tell (and the ways I tell those stories) with other tales of Black girlhood. And this is the beauty of Black girlhood in fiction: the stories we tell about Black girls will resonate with Black girls, but they are also universal tales of self-love and acceptance, pain and joy, strength and trauma, which will resonate with every reader. They are stories that the world needs to hear.

Read about the other entries on the list.

The Hate U Give is among Chris Whitaker's six top kid narrators in literature, Sif Sigmarsdóttir's top ten novels about burning issues for young adults, and Natasha Ochshorn's seven banned books that should be required reading.

--Marshal Zeringue