I break for art and underdogs.
ABOUT MARY
Mary McBeth is an Afrofuturistic shamanic researcher of Black Girlhood.
Mary is the founder and editor-in-chief of Memoir Magazine, editor of the upcoming Black Memoirs Matter anthology, and the creator of the annual Memoir Prize for Books and the #MeToo Essay Award. Her memoir project has received fellowships from Roots.Wounds.Words, Wildseeds Writers, and Rosemary’s House, and her writing has appeared in 82 Review, Argot Magazine, Nervous Breakdown, Cobalt Review, Awakened Voices, among other places. She is a polyglot and former fashion model who now lives in Durham, NC, with her husband and dog.
“There are novels and journalistic works that tell either the Black immigrant or Black (southern) migrant story, but I have not seen them told as intertwined in this way. ”
—Andrea Hunter
MARY’S WORK
As a memoirist and educator, I support others in the intertwined crafts of literary storytelling, brave truth-saying, and authentic self-making. I believe that Black girls’ authentic first-person accounts — more than any “objective” scholarly account — are a crucial window into our world; that have the potential to tell us vital lessons about humanity and the society we could become. A microcosm that contains the universal story of humanity which can teach about the illusive machinery of inequality, suffering, and resilience, ultimately helping us understand all women and girlhood globally.
It is these universal truths about the intersections of Blackness, Womanhood, and Girlhood that I seek to excavate through my work: the wickedness we endure, just trying to live and be loved; The ways we have had to hide our brilliance in order to survive and the ways we reinvent ourselves for emotional survival.
My essay collection, The Black Memoirs Matter Anthology, and my debut memoir, The Secret Life of Grownups, are about what life is really like on planet earth for little Black girls who will not be tamed, and who don’t understand why the truth doesn’t actually set anyone free, and what happens when generations of women are silenced and unprotected are currently being evaluated for representation/publication, while I work on my second memoir “Perfect” about leaving behind teenaged homelessness in New York City and going on to work 12 years as a fashion model in Italy.
Get to know my words.
My work and my life are signposts for BIPOC girls and women to have the courage to be vulnerable in service of speaking their truth, to voice their forbidden dreams.