Hear Our Truths: The Creative Potential of Black Girlhood
Ruth Nicole Brown
University of Illinois Press
A creative space for the performance of radically new interpretations of Black girls' lived experiences

This volume examines how Saving Our Lives Hear Our Truths, or SOLHOT, a radical youth intervention, provides a space for the creative performance and expression of Black girlhood and how this creativity informs other realizations about Black girlhood and womanhood. Founded in 2006 and co-organized by the author, SOLHOT is an intergenerational collective organizing effort that celebrates and recognizes Black girls as producers of culture and knowledge. Girls discuss diverse expressions of Black girlhood, critique the issues that are important to them, and create art that keeps their lived experiences at its center.

The following video is a sample of the types of projects the book describes. It was produced by the group Saving Our Lives Hear Our Truths (SOLHOT) and is being used to promote Hear Our Truths: The Creative Potential of Black Girlhood. 

Drawing directly from her experiences in SOLHOT, Ruth Nicole Brown argues that when Black girls reflect on their own lives, they articulate radically unique ideas about their lived experiences. She documents the creative potential of Black girls and women who are working together to advance original theories, practices, and performances that affirm complexity, interrogate power, and produce humanizing representation of Black girls' lives. In doing so, this book expands on the work of Black feminists and feminists of color and breaks intriguing new ground in Black feminist thought and methodology. Emotionally and intellectually powerful, Hear Our Truths deftly combines theory with creativity to show how the creative helps theorize and how theory can be enacted through creativity.

"Activists, artists, community organizers, and youth leaders will find instructive Brown's innovative approach to conducting, analyzing and presenting her work with youth, as well as scholars interested in feminist methodologies, community-based or participatory action research, and alternative research methods."--Gender & Society

"The book illustrates the creative methods of black girls and those who do black girl work and provides a progressive depiction of the complexity and necessity of the creative potential of black girls."--Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy

"This impressive and refreshing book explores the creative potential of Black girlhood and offers a variety of options for ways to engage Black girls and work with them to become the very best of who they are destined to be. Ruth Nicole Brown's work will no doubt have a lasting impact."--Gwendolyn D. Pough, author of Check It While I Wreck It: Black Womanhood, Hip-Hop Culture, and the Public Sphere

Ruth Nicole Brown is an assistant professor of gender and women's studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is the author of Black Girlhood Celebration: Toward a Hip-Hop Feminist Pedagogy and coeditor of Wish to Live: The Hip-Hop Feminism Pedagogy Reader.