Biography Girls

Black girls are leading, organizing, advocating, and creating. They are starting nonprofits. Building political coalitions. Promoting diverse literature. Fighting cancer. Improving water quality. Working to prevent gun violence.

Nice Leng`ete was raised in a Maasai village in Kenya. In 1998, when Nice was six, her parents fell sick and died, and Nice and her sister, Soila, were taken in by their father’s brother, who had little interest in the girls beyond what their dowries might fetch. Fearing “the cut” (female genital mutilation, a painful and sometimes deadly ritualistic surgery), which was the fate of all Maasai women, Nice and Soila climbed a tree to hide.

Was a hacker diverting phone calls meant for Las Vegas escort services? The FBI wanted to know, and so did associates of a New York Mafia family. In one of the most unusual undercover operations ever, the FBI had an agent acting as a manager in a real Las Vegas escort service. Federal agents expected to find prostitution and drugs in the Las Vegas escort industry. What their investigation uncovered was even more serious.

In 1971, Robin Green had an interview with Jann Wenner at the offices Rolling Stone magazine. Green thought she was interviewing for a clerical job like the other girls in the office, a "real job". Instead, she was hired as a journalist. Brutally honest and bold, Robin Green reveals what it was like to be the first woman granted entry into an iconic boys' club. Pulling back the curtain on Rolling Stone magazine in its prime, The Only Girl is a stunning tribute to a bygone era and a publication that defined a generation.

This is Diablo's captivating fish-out-of-water story of her yearlong walk on the wild side, from quiet gentlemen's clubs to multilevel sex palaces and glassed-in peep shows. In witty prose she gives readers a behind-the-scenes look at this industry through a writer's keen eye, chronicling her descent into the skin trade and the effect it had on her self-image and her relationship with her now husband.

As Australia sank into the darkest days of the Great Depression, a succession of bloody mysteries grabbed headlines and gripped the country. The Hammer Horror, The Bungendore Bones, The Park Demon, The Human Glove and The Pyjama Girl—these were just some of the grisly cases that had to be solved by the Sydney detectives of The Murder Squad. The Murder Squad reopens the files on Australia's most chilling forgotten crimes to ask who was guilty, who was innocent, and whether some cops were as dangerous as the monsters they were hunting.

Imagine...growing up in an unfinished geodesic dome home with no heat or running water, wearing the same clothes to school every day, and eating breakfast cereal with warm goat milk. In this whimsical, poetic, and gripping autobiographical account, Jennifer Asbenson describes her abusive, dysfunctional, and chaotic upbringing, her abduction and escape from a serial killer, her years in and out of mental hospitals, her decision to heal herself, and ultimately, her path to wholeness.

In 1942, the Allies were losing, Germany seemed unstoppable, and every able man in England was on the front lines. To "set Europe ablaze," in the words of Winston Churchill, the Special Operations Executive (SOE), whose spies were trained in everything from demolition to sharpshooting, was forced to do something unprecedented: recruit women. Thirty-nine answered the call, leaving their lives and families to become saboteurs in France.

Twice: The Story of K-Pop’s Greatest Girl Group tells the amazing story behind one of the most loved groups of our time. Covering their triumphs and setbacks, the making of everyone’s favourite tracks - including ‘Like Ooh-Aah’, ‘Cheer Up’ and ‘Likey’ - and their unique sense of style, this in-depth, unofficial guide is perfect for any Twice fan.

While their husbands, brothers and sweethearts fought in Europe and their mothers, sisters and friends kept the home fires burning, for the first time, a group of remarkable women took to the skies. They weren't allowed into combat but risked their lives in bad weather and without radios to bring our boys the aircraft they so vitally needed. Employed by the Air Transport Auxiliary, these women were known as 'attagirls'. They proved that women, too, could master Spitfires, Mosquitoes and Hawker Hurricanes, forging a new path in aviation.

Mrs. Grace Humiston was an amazing lawyer and a traveling detective during a time when no women were practicing those professions. She focused on solving cases no one else wanted and advocating for innocents. One of her greatest accomplishments was solving the cold case of a missing 18-year-old girl, Ruth Cruger. Her work changed how the country viewed the problem of missing girls, but it came with a price: she learned all too well what happens when one woman upstages the entire NYPD.

Kathleen Rooney draws on her own experiences working as an artist's model, as well as the famous, notorious, and mysterious artists and models through the ages. Through a combination of personal perspective, historical anecdote, and witty prose, Live Nude Girl reveals that both the appeal of posing nude for artists and the appeal of drawing the naked figure lie in our deeply human responses to beauty, sex, love, and death.

As featured in the Oscar-nominated documentary Crip Camp, and for fans of I Am Malala, one of the most influential disability rights activists in US history tells her story of fighting to belong.

With Really Bad Girls of the Bible, Liz reveals the power of God's sovereignty in the lives of shady ladies we know by reputation but have rarely studied in depth: Bathsheba, the bathing beauty. Jael, the tent-peg-toting warrior princess. Herodias, the horrible beheader.

On Thursday 9th October, Michelle Hadaway's worst fears came true. After watching her daughter Karen playing in the neighbour's garden with her best friend Nicola, Michelle returned to cook dinner for her family. Unbeknownst to her, this would be the last time she would ever see Karen alive. In the following days and months, shocking details would come to light about the nature of Karen and Nicola's murders, and the case which had come to be known as 'the Babes in the Wood murders' would lead to one of the most infamous and cruellest miscarriages of justice in British history.

Clare Bowditch has always had a knack for telling stories. Through her music and performing, this beloved Australian artist has touched hundreds of thousands of lives. But what of the stories she used to tell herself? That 'real life' begins only once you're thin or beautiful, that good things happen only to other people. Your Own Kind of Girl reveals a childhood punctuated by grief, anxiety and compulsion and tells how these forces shaped Clare's life for better and for worse. This is a heartbreaking, wise and at times playful memoir.

For over two decades the identity of Melissa Witt's murderer has been hidden among the dense trees and thorny undergrowth rooted deeply in the uneven ground of a remote mountaintop in the Ozark National Forest. Determined to find answers, LaDonna Humphrey has spent the past seven years hunting for Melissa's killer. Her investigation, both thrilling and unpredictable, has led her on a journey like no other.

Sola Mahfouz was born in Afghanistan in 1996. That same year, the Taliban took over her country for the first time. They banned television and photographs, presided over brutal public executions, and turned the clock backwards on women’s rights, practically imprisoning women within their own homes and forcing them to wear all-concealing burqas. As time passed, Sola began to understand that she was condemned to the same existence as millions of women in Afghanistan. Driven by this devastating realization, Sola began a years-long fight to change the trajectory of her life.

The nation wept when news broke of nearly three-year-old Caylee Anthony's disappearance from her home in Florida in July 2007. The search for Caylee made front-page headlines. But Casey Anthony continued to lie to law enforcement about her daughter's whereabouts, complicating their search for the truth.

The story of a young girl's entrapment in gambling addiction. The true advert for problem gambling and how it controlled her every movement, her every thought and almost took her life. How the guilt and shame that go hand-in-hand with addiction stopped her from reaching out for help for eight years as she didn't feel it was okay for a young female to be a problem gambler. How she believed it was a male dominated problem, and how eventually, she did find the tools that enabled her to become free of her addiction.