The Black Voices Book Club discusses books written by Black authors.
Join us for a discussion of Big Girl by Mecca Jamilah Sullivan, a coming of age story set in 1990's Harlem narrated by eight-year-old Malaya. Malaya hates attending Weight Watchers meetings with her mother; she’d rather paint alone in her bedroom or enjoy forbidden street foods with her father. The pressures of Malaya's predominantly white Upper East Side prep school are relentless, as are the expectations passed down from her painfully proper mother and sharp-tongued grandmother. A a family tragedy forces Malaya to face the source of her hunger, ultimately shattering her inherited stigmas surrounding women’s bodies, and embracing her own desire.
Big Girl was a New York Times Editors' Choice selection in 2022 and a Next Generation Indie Book Awards First Novel Award Winner. You can read an interview with the author at the Center for Fiction here.
About The Author
Mecca Jamilah Sullivan, Ph.D., has written two other books: The Poetics of Difference: Queer Feminist Forms in the African Diaspora, winner of the William Sanders Scarborough Prize from the MLA; and the short story collection, Blue Talk and Love, winner of the Judith Markowitz Award from Lambda Literary. Her short stories have appeared in Best New Writing, Kenyon Review and DC Metro Weekly, among others. Professor Sullivan is Associate Professor of English at Georgetown University, where she teaches courses in African American poetry and poetics, Black queer and feminist literatures, and creative writing.