Well-Read Black Girl and Pioneer Works present the second annual Well-Read Black Girl Festival, a celebration of Black women readers and writers that seeks to initiate meaningful conversations within the literary arts. This year’s festival includes authors Jacqueline Woodson, Veronica Chambers, Renée Watson, Mahogany Browne, Blair Imani, and many more to be announced!
Well-Read Black Girl is a book club for Black women founded in 2015 that amplifies the voices of Black writers and celebrates their unique place in the world. Glory Edim is the founder of Well-Read Black Girl and received the 2017 Innovator’s Award from the Los Angeles Times Book Prizes for her work as a literary advocate. She serves on the board of New York City’s Housing Works Bookstore and lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Illustration by Alex Bowman
The festival is made possible by partners Random House and Greenlight Bookstore.
Meet Camille Acker at WRBG Festival!!
The stories in this debut collection shatter monolithic assumptions of black womanhood.
“An exciting literary achievement by a significant emerging talent. This flawlessly executed work reinvigorates the short fiction genre.” —BUST
In her debut short story collection, Camille Acker unleashes the irony and tragic comedy of respectability onto a wide-ranging cast of characters, all of whom call Washington, DC, home. A "woke" millennial tries to fight gentrification, only to learn she's part of the problem; a grade school teacher dreams of a better DC, only to take out her frustrations on her students; and a young piano player wins a competition, only to learn the prize is worthless.
Ultimately, they are confronted with the fact that respectability does not equal freedom. Instead, they must learn to trust their own conflicted judgment and fight to create their own sense of space and self.
