Summary

How to Survive is a manifesto made up of 30 points to empower black woman through self-adulation, affirmation, solidarity, and acceptance of their experience of the world, while resisting the narrative that they are paranoid. In A Black Girl Like Me, Jerkins narrates her interactions with other black women writers who have helped her throughout her career. She asked a black female writer for a contact at The New Yorker, believing that she would be best able to infiltrate the writing scenes by asking and pushing her way in with the help of other black women. In Princeton, she applied to their Creative Writing Program but was rejected. She wrote an essay for the Daily Princetonian about "why the Creative Writing Program was too restrictive" (246). She was criticized in the comments...