Back in February of 2017, in the middle of the night, true music fans were blessed with an Instagram Live that featured Swizz Beatz and Just Blaze in an intimate studio setting surrounded by onlookers. They ran through their extensive catalogs back to back as Swizz talked some of the…

The NAACP Image Award-nominated author gets deep in ‘Grown’ — In 2017, right before the release of her debut YA novel Allegedly, Tiffany D. Jackson wrote at a yoga and journaling workshop in New York City that her biggest hopes were for “peace and that people would like her books.” Since then, Jackson has written four books and racked up…

For Black women, it seems like a foreign concept. — I want to feel safe. That has been reverberating in my mind lately only to be met with the thought, there’s no such thing as safe for Black women. Not at the hands of those that claim to protect and serve. (Arrest the officers that killed Breonna Taylor.) Not among…

I’ll never forget calling to consolidate my student loans and basically getting a recording that said, everything is frozen right now, there’s nothing we can do. That was 2008 and without consolidation, my loan payments would have been something like $400 per month. In 2020, the experience has been very…

Her latest novel is a testament to her commitment to Black women’s lives and to her individual craft — In 1995, my nine-year-old self watched as Whitney Houston, Lelah Rochon, Loretta Devine, and Angela Bassett took the screen in Waiting to Exhale, the eponymous adaptation of Terry McMillan’s 1992 New York Times bestseller. At the time, I had no idea how revolutionary it was to see four Black women…

There just aren’t enough platforms supporting it. — The R&B community has been in a bit of a tizzy since the comments made by Brooklyn rapper Young M.A. that “R&B music just doesn’t feel the same anymore.” In her tweet from Feb. 24th, she stated: “ Music don’t feel the same because we barely have R&B, … R&B…

A Realization After Surviving R. Kelly. — There will be a million think pieces about Surviving R. Kelly, the six-part docuseries that aired on Lifetime in early January. But I couldn’t help but think of how easily it could have been me recounting stories of being a young woman just trying to “make it” in the music…

Watching the Season 3 finale of Insecure led me back to the thought I’d been having about toxicity vs. “the work,” of relationships and how do we know the difference? “We had matching luggage and we put in the work.” This statement was in response to Lawrence (Jay Ellis) telling…

Sanaa Lathan played a role that many of us can identify with. — Along with the first kiss, first dates, and fallouts with friends, what seems etched in the minds of Black women is also the first time they cut their hair. In Black culture, there is an attachment to hair that has seemed to last through generations. At times there are tears…