Spoken Black Girl Mag

07/21/2025

Deadline: August 1, 2025

The Granum Foundation Prize is awarded annually to help U.S.-based writers complete substantive literary works—such as poetry books, essay or short story collections, novels, and memoirs—or to help launch these works.

Funding can be used to provide a writer with the tools, time, and freedom to help ensure their success. For example, resources may be used to cover basic needs, equipment purchases, mentorship, or editing services. One winner will be awarded $5,000. Up to three finalists will be awarded $500 or more.

Additionally, the Granum Foundation Translation Prize will be awarded to support the completion of a work translated into English by a U.S.-based writer. One winner will receive $1,500 or more.

www.granumfoundation.org

07/03/2025

Happy July! Here at SBG we are celebrating Soft Black July. I hope these affirmations bring you ease and comfort while giving you permission to rest and receive this month! Let me know which one resonates the most for you!

How are you embracing your softer side this summer?

If you’re looking to dig a little deeper, tap into this month’s offering One on One Soft Power coaching sessions designed to support you on your creative journey. Ready to flourish without burnout? Looking to take the next intuitive step in your writing or creative career? Then this is for you! Check out the Coaching Services on Spokenblackgirl.com!
Link in bio! 💞🫶🏾

06/29/2025

✨ Celebrate Black Beauty — In Every Page, Every Post, Every Voice. ✨
Spoken Black Girl Magazine is now accepting print + digital ad placements for Issue 6: Celebrate Black Beauty — a radiant tribute to the beauty, brilliance, and power of Black women.

Whether you're a wellness brand, author, beauty entrepreneur, or community builder, this is your moment to stand with us and be seen.

🖤 Showcase your mission
🖤 Support Black women creators
🖤 Align with a movement rooted in healing, art, and truth

📣 Reserve your spot: spokenblackgirl.com/advertise

06/20/2025

Today we are launching Pre-orders for The Ugly Cry: A Memoir of Essays and Meditations on Grief, Anger, Honesty, and Freedom by Dr. Shameka Poetry Thomas 🙌🏾

Congratulations, Dr. Thomas!

About the Book:

In this unflinching debut, Dr. Shameka Poetry Thomas pulls back the veil of curated perfection and invites readers into the raw, sacred spaces of her healing journey. The Ugly Cry is a lyrical and fearless collection of essays and meditations chronicling her experiences with motherhood, miscarriage, divorce, co-parenting, sexual abuse, and the quiet rage that often comes with being a Black woman expected to smile through pain.

What began as a private practice of journaling and therapy transformed into a powerful testimony of self-reclamation. Through deeply personal stories and poetic reflection, Dr. Thomas explores generational trauma, toxic family patterns, and the path to radical self-love.

This is not a guide book — it’s a mirror for those who are learning to hold space for their grief, rage, and beauty, all at once.

Publication Date: September 1, 2025
Pre-order on Spokenblackgirl.com

https://www.spokenblackgirl.com/sbg-shop/the-ugly-cry-a-memoir-of-essays-and-meditations-on-grief-anger-honesty-and-freedom

06/11/2025

06/05/2025

: Explore our research guide highlighting collections devoted to LGBTQ+ Studies. Materials include the personal papers of writer James Baldwin, jazz singer Ada “Bricktop” Smith, and entertainer Stormé DeLarverié—widely believed to have sparked the Stonewall Uprising—and more.
https://ow.ly/894E50W2baY
Digital Collections Images: ps_mss_873, 58835927, 1699937, and 58660966

06/05/2025

The name The Color Purple didn’t come to Alice Walker in a dream or a flash of inspiration it emerged from the soil of Black American history, buried in a 19th-century folk song. While writing the novel, Walker stumbled upon these lines:

"Oh, they tells me of a home far beyond the skies,
Oh, they tells me of a home far away;
Oh, they tells me of a home where no storm clouds rise,
Oh, they tells me of an unclouded day.

But I ask you, wouldn’t you fight
If they steals your sacred rights?
And the color purple in the field
Is the only thing God revealed."

She took a fleeting image from an old protest song and turned it into a theological revolution. When Shug tells Celie:

"I think it pi**es God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it,"
she’s channeling that folk wisdom the divine isn’t in distant heavens, but in the marginalized and overlooked. The very song that inspired Walker’s title was nearly erased by time—just as Celie’s voice is nearly erased by abuse. By resurrecting it, Walker performed the same act of preservation she gives Celie in the novel.

Book: https://amzn.to/4jjTuk2

Free Audiobook : https://amzn.to/4iomjdS

05/27/2025

05/27/2025