Loyalty is delighted to host a panel in celebration of the release of Sex and the Single Woman focused on Black maternal health, featuring Evette Dionne, Dani McClain, and Celeste Rios! This event will be held digitally via Crowdcast. Click here to register for the event with a donation of any amount of your choice. You can also order the book on our website to be added to the event's registration list. Donations will go to Partners in Abortion Care. There will also be an option to snag the book during the event.

A feminist anthology inspired by legendary Cosmopolitan editor Helen Gurley Brown’s Sex and the Single Girl, featuring twenty-four new essays on the triumphs and heartbreaks of modern singlehood from acclaimed and bestselling authors, including Kristen Arnett, Morgan Parker, Evette Dionne, and Melissa Febos.

Sixty years ago, Helen Gurley Brown's Sex and the Single Girl sent shockwaves through the United States, selling more than two million copies in three weeks. Helen’s message was radical for its time: marriage wasn’t essential for women to lead rich, fulfilling lives.

Now, in these critical, wry, and expansive essays, twenty-four writers reconsider Helen’s advice and how it applies to their own paths, fielding topics that she couldn’t—or wouldn’t—conceive of in 1962: contraception and abortion (an omission demanded by her publisher), queer and trans womanhood, polyamory, celibacy, interracial dating, bodies of all kinds, consent, sex work, IVF, and the pop culture that both saves and fails us.

Eliza Smith and Haley Swanson’s revisionist anthology honors Brown’s irreverent spirit while also validating our modern experiences of singlehood, encouraging us all to reclaim joy where it’s so often been denied.

Evette Dionne is a journalist, pop-culture critic, and magazine editor. She’s the National Book Award–nominated and Coretta Scott King Honor author of Lifting as We Climb: Black Women’s Battle for the Ballot Box, and she currently works on Netflix’s editorial team. Evette writes extensively about pop culture through the lenses of race, gender, and size for a number of print and digital publications, including NBC News, Cosmopolitan, Glamour, Time, The New York Times, Guardian, SELF, and Harper’s Bazaar. You can find her across the web at @freeblackgirl.

Celeste Rios is a DONA and Innate Postpartum Certified Doula that offers ancestral healing modalities to support the new mother heal post-natally, bond with her new baby, and begin to adjust to motherhood. The mother-centered postpartum care includes vaginal steaming, energy work, the closing of the bones, meal prep, and herbal remedies.

Dani McClain is an award-winning journalist who reports on race, parenting and reproductive health. McClain's writing has appeared in outlets including The New York Times, TIME, The Atlantic and Harper's Bazaar. McClain is a contributing writer at The Nation and a Puffin fellow with Type Media Center. She was a staff reporter at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and has worked as a strategist with organizations including Color of Change and Drug Policy Alliance. Her book, We Live for the We: The Political Power of Black Motherhood, was published in 2019 by Bold Type Books and was shortlisted in 2020 for a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. She was the Cincinnati public library's Writer-in-Residence in 2020 and 2021.

Please note Loyalty has a zero tolerance policy for harassment or intimidation of any kind during this virtual event.

Black Maternal Health Panel w/ Evette Dionne, Dani McClain, and Celeste Rios