About – Black Girls Stay Lit ™

About Black Girls Stay Lit™

A Literacy Movement for Black Girl Excellence

Our Mission

Black Girls Stay Lit™ engages Black female/femme adolescents with culturally/gender sustaining literature, interpretative lenses and strategies as well as expressive writing in order to bolster their literacy and academic outcomes, cognitive and social-emotional competence, and socio-cultural awareness and engagement. Its culturally sustaining pedagogy re-centers and affirms culture, identity and lived-experience as central features of personal well-being for adolescents while also emphasizing social-emotional learning, social justice and literacy-based skill development, including oral and written communication skills, critical thinking and analysis, empathy, collaboration and creative problem-solving.

Our Vision

Black Girls Stay Lit™ sustains and empowers the literacies, histories, gender and cultural values of Black female/femme adolescents and their communities, and upholds a communal space in which their voices are heard, validated, cultivated, and amplified. Participants begin the processes of making meaning of their intersectional identities and belonging deeply to themselves, honing their unique capacities for Black female/femme excellence, and working to co-create a more equitable, just and beautiful world.

Guiding Proverbs

"If you educate a man, you educate an individual but if you educate a woman, you educate a family (nation)."

—Traditional proverb, Fanti (Ghana)

"Until lions start writing down their own stories, the hunters will always be the heroes. "

— Traditional proverb (Kenya and Zimbabwe)

“Resistance is the secret of joy”

—Pulitzer Prize-Winning Author, Alice Walker, Possessing the Secret of Joy

Our FouNdeR

Dr. Tiffany Noelle

Our Founder: Dr. Tiffany Noelle (nee, Hinton) is the founder, director and lead facilitator of Black Girls Stay Lit™ (BGSL). Dr. T., as her students affectionately refer to her, is a long-time educator, consultant, and scholar of Black women’s literature and culture. With a Ph.D. in English, specializing in Africana Women’s Literary and Cultural Studies, Dr. T.

has more than 20 years’ experience designing, facilitating and administering educational programs, including 12+ years as a professor of English, literature and writing and two years as director of a college-based Writing Center.

BGSL is Dr. T’s passion project, which she lovingly designed to immerse Black girls in the transformative power of Black women’s literature as a vehicle for women-centered cultural transmission and sustenance, guidance and uplift. Dr. T. is a proud fifth-generation Cincinnatian and graduate of Walnut Hills High School. She earned her Ph.D. in English at University of Florida; M.A. in English at Florida State University; and B.A. in Journalism and African American Studies at University of Cincinnati.

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