An Evening With Terry McMillan & Glory Edim

Glory Edim is the founder of Well-Read Black Girl, a Brooklyn-based book club and digital platform that celebrates the uniqueness of Black literature and sisterhood. In fall 2017 she organized the first-ever Well-Read Black Girl Festival. She has worked as a creative strategist for over ten years at startups and cultural institutions. Most recently, she was the Publishing Outreach Specialist at Kickstarter. She serves on the board of New York City’s Housing Works Bookstore. In her anthology Well-Read Black Girl: Finding Our Stories, Discovering Ourselves (Ballantine Books) , Glory Edim brings together original essays by some of our best black women writers to shine a light on how important it is that we all—regardless of gender, race, religion, or ability—have the opportunity to find ourselves in literature. Contributors include Jesmyn Ward (Sing, Unburied, Sing), Lynn Nottage (Sweat), Jacqueline Woodson (Another Brooklyn), Gabourey Sidibe (This Is Just My Face), Morgan Jerkins (This Will Be My Undoing), Tayari Jones (An American Marriage), Rebecca Walker (Black, White and Jewish), and Barbara Smith (Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology)In this anthology Glory Edim has created a space in which black women’s writing and knowledge and life experiences are lifted up, to be shared with all readers who value the power of a story to help us understand the world and ourselves. The Washington Post said “Each essay can be read as a dispatch from the vast and wonderfully complex location that is black girlhood and womanhood.”

Terry McMillan is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Waiting to Exhale, How Stella Got Her Groove Back, A Day Late and a Dollar Short, and The Interruption of Everything. She is the editor of Breaking Ice: An Anthology of Contemporary African-American Fiction. Each of McMillan’s nine previous novels was a New York Times bestseller, and four have been made into movies. In It’s Not All Downhill From Here (Ballantine Books), she introduces us to Loretha Curry. On the eve of her sixty-eighth birthday, she has a booming beauty-supply empire, a gaggle of lifelong friends, and a husband whose moves still surprise. She might be carrying a few more pounds than she should, but she is not one of those women who think her best days are behind her—and she’s determined to prove everyone else with that outdated view of aging wrong. It’s not all downhill from here. Salon magazine praised it, calling it “A deeply moving book that gently balances the realities—both personal and societal—of aging with a hopeful message: It’s never too late to change how you’re living your life.”