What's Next for She's Full of Lit
The three of us came together a year ago to start She's Full of Lit, and I don't think any of us imagined we would grow our community to the scale that it has in the last year (mainly due to a "do not read" review, but we digress). The blog has brought us closer together as friends, and it has challenged us as readers and thinkers.
We all came to this space with our favorite genres, but we have pushed ourselves to read outside of our comfort zone over the past months — all for the better. We have processed joy and trauma through reads, and we have shared all of that with you.
At the heart of all of these deep thoughts is where we go from here. The three of us consider ourselves to be progressive thinkers and social justice proponents, but we — like many white women — are constantly reframing what it means to be a friend, an advocate, and an ally. It is definitely not enough to just be "not racist." We need to be anti-racist, and we need to put our personal convictions more front and center in this space.
A few steps we are going to take from now on:
1. Prioritize Black authors, in all genres - Since we started the blog, we have prioritized reading women-identifying authors (obviously), but we didn't go deeper into race or sexual orientation. As Elizabeth said in her post Friday, claiming to be "colorblind" is incredibly problematic. While we don't operate as "colorblind" in our personal lives, we are sorry we leaned into that mindset on the blog. Moving forward, we pledge to make at least 25% of reviewed books written by Black authors. While we will read some of the essential anti-racist books highlighted earlier, we also want to centralize Black stories of joy, of love, and of contemporary life.
2. Donate all Amazon affiliate earnings to social justice charges (quarterly) - We don't make much from Amazon links, tbh, but we have been feeling gross about Jeff Bezos for a while. However, Elizabeth and Shannon are both committed Kindle readers, and we know you may be as well, so we continue to provide Amazon links. Moving forward, we are going to commit to donating our Amazon earnings to an organization that supports the social justice causes we support, and we will use Shannon and Elizabeth's corporate overlords to match those donations. (Moira works for a nonprofit, otherwise she would avail herself of corporate matches!) We will also add a personal contribution as well. For what we have earned so far, we will be making a donation to the Loveland Foundation , which supports so many things near and dear to our hearts: mental health, young women, and therapy.
We will highlight and share these causes on our Instagram, and we will share which causes we donate to from here on out.
3. Speak up when we see racism in the bookstagram/literary world - Unfortunately, though the world of books is generally socially progressive, we've seen content on insta/from publishing houses/from Book of the Month that has left us with a bad taste in our mouths. While we are "nice girls" (well, at least Elizabeth and Moira) (Shannon has generally always been an outspoken bitch), there is nothing kind about being silent when we see casual racism. We pledge to do the work in calling out racism in our online community, so that the labor does not fall on Black bookstagrammers/authors.
4. Inspire you to do the work along with us - Yes, we are going to read the books we all need to read, but it's not enough for us to read them. We need everyone that reads this blog to commit to picking up the same anti-racist reads we do. We are working to figure out a way to feature anti-racism nonfiction in a new way, different from our regular reviews, but we can’t do the work for you.
We hope that you will continue to read along with us, for the fun rom coms, the deeper non-fiction, and everything in between. We have always prided ourselves on reviewing all kinds of books, and we are now going to focus more on who writes those books.
