Stevona Elem-Rogers, a.k.a. Stevie (like Wonder!), is a writer, educator, and cultural worker speaking to the human condition through the rich, expansive lens of Black womanhood.

Her voice blends literary depth with the intimacy and wit of kitchen-table storytelling, a tradition passed down from her Alabama Black Belt grandmother. Through writing, public dialogue, and community-centered creative work, she highlights the brilliance and complexity of Black life across the diaspora.

She is the creator of Black Women Are For Grown-Ups, a nationally recognized project that began as a t-shirt campaign and grew into a womanist archive centering the interior lives of Black women as essential to America's cultural and intellectual landscape. Its signature work includes the first Little Free Library in the U.S. dedicated solely to books by Black women. With early support from Nikki Giovanni and Sonia Sanchez, the project affirms that access to Black women's thought strengthens a more just and imaginative society.

Her writing has appeared in The New York Times with Cleo Wade, in i-D Magazine profiling Solange Knowles, and in Essence, where her love letter, "Dear New Orleans," became the Festival’s 30th-anniversary cover story. Her chapbook, featured on LSU’s “Black Girl Magic Across Time and Space” syllabus, has been recognized by Saint Heron, the Amistad Research Center, We Buy Gold, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

With a B.A. in English and African American Studies and a Master of Arts in Teaching, she began her career as a high school English teacher, creating the first African American Literature course in New Orleans's charter system. Her strengths-based research later informed Teach For America's national approach to culturally responsive teaching. She went on to co-found Black Education for New Orleans (BE NOLA) and to conceive Black Is Brilliant, a Harvard-recognized ecosystem that reimagines Black education as a living, creative, cultural story.

And if you don't know her from all that, you might remember the viral July 4th rant that put Anna Murray Douglass back in America's memory, reminding the world that Black women have always made freedom possible.

Stevie calls New Orleans home.

Follow her journey: stevie_elem