Black Girl Times (BGX) is always looking for thought-provoking stories and content for Black women, girls, and the people who love them. We focus on the lives and experiences of women, and we provide a brave space to enlighten, express and share ourselves. We want to hear your unique stories of community, family, and self. We want your triumphs and your disappointments. We want your tales of personal growth, and we want to hear about the growth that still needs to happen in our community, our schools, and our government. Above all, we want our readers to gain a better understanding of our identity, triumphs, struggles, and the beauty of Black girls and women in the Southeast and beyond.
What we are looking for:
Self Reflection:
Pieces exploring mental, physical, and spiritual health to fitness to sex and dating and parenting. We love first-person reflections and reporting with expert sources that examine these topics.
Photography and original artwork:
We love featuring original graphic art on our online blogging platform, Black Girl Times, and in our monthly newsletter.
Don’t forget the audience you are writing for:
While we are sensitive to the ways white supremacy and patriarchy impact all marginalized groups, it is essential to us there is a throughline of how the topic impacts Black women and girls.
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For example, if you were writing about K-Pop you would need to address the tension between AAPI and Black people within the K-Pop subculture within the piece.
Cultural criticism:
Pieces that identify and expand ideas about television, music, art, or books and how they impact culture.
Show us you can handle the pitch:
Link to examples of past work that features a style, tone, or format that’s similar to what you’ve pitched us. This will help inspire confidence that you are capable of executing on your idea. Don’t forget to share any experience, expertise, or insight you have that makes your point of view unique and valuable.
Basic Q&As:
We aren’t opposed to these, but they will be scrutinized heavily. The person or the reason you want to interview them must be engaging, timely, and relevant to our audience.
Make your pitch clear and concise:
Lead with the headline and get to the central idea quickly and succinctly.
Basically, if you find a way to express it, we’ll find a way to share it.
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We want to hear about your experiences. You’re creative. Show us so we can show others–and pay you for it. One of the most important things about all the storytelling we do is the essentiality of using narrative and voice to shift culture, perspective, and to unburden yourself. BGX relies on content creators to do this.
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We are Black, Southern girls, women, gender non-conforming, and we are resisters.
Before you hit send here are a few tips
Read BGX, and become familiar with our tone. We don’t do breaking news or solicit outrage traffic.
Use a conversational style, avoid jargon no matter the type, and use active, not passive verbs! It won’t hurt to be familiar with the work of The Lighthouse | Black Girl Projects.
Don’t pitch us a story that’s already been done on BGX.
What we aren’t looking for:
Reviews/Opinions: We have staff and established contributors that handle reviews. If you want to write criticism, you should pitch us a more focused angle that emphasizes a specific aspect of the work or that considers a group of thematically related works together.
Fiction: We do not accept fiction submissions from non-established contributors.
Pre-written articles: If it wasn’t pitched to us as an idea, that means it wasn’t written with us in mind, and we’re not going to want it. We like to be able to work collaboratively with our contributors on the content we commission and publish.