Evette Dionne Books In Order

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Publication Order of Anthologies

Evette Dionne
Evette Dionne was raised in New York. She is a culture writer whose work centers around Black feminism and current events. Evette has published her writing in the New York Times, Harper’s Bazaar, and Teen Vogue, as well as others. She was previously a senior news editor at Clutch Magazine and The Revelist.

She first matriculated at University of Maryland Eastern Shore and she later transferred to the HBCU Bennett College, where she got her bachelor’s degree in 2012.

Evette later got her master’s degree in media management and women, sexuality, and gender studies from Southern Illinois University Carbondale. From 2018 to 2021, Evette was the editor-in-chief of Bitch. Issue #92 was the last issue of Bitch that she produced during her tenure.

Dionne’s commentary has been cited in several outlets on topics that include the legacy of Kobe Bryant, Toni Morrison, and gynecological health.

“Lifting As We Climb” was longlisted for the 2020 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature, and received Honors from Orbis Pictus Award and ALA, Coretta Scott King Book Award.

She was inspired to write “Lifting As We Climb” in 2016 after she noticed that women were visiting the graves of various white female suffragettes like Elizabeth Cady Stanton in the lead up to the presidential election. Evette wanted to highlight the contributions of Black women in earning the right to vote. It was written for a middle grade audience.

Reading has always been an integral part of her life. When she was three years old, she saw this commercial for Hooked On Phonics, and even though her dad said not to call the number, she did it anyway. It was the first time that she realized the phone dial included both letters and numbers. Thankfully, her dad was nice enough to order Hooked on Phonics for her, and that was actually how she learned to read.

By the time she got to kindergarten, she could read very well, so her elementary school teachers would let her read to the class in the afternoons. She loved this, and she is pretty sure that this gave her the teaching bug early on.

Lastly, the library was one of her favorite places to be when she was a kid, and her local librarians were like mother hens. They could be in the library all day long, without any parental supervision, and their parents would know they were safe since the librarians kept an eye on them. It was also in that same library that she first learned how to use the internet and participate in chat rooms.

She used to check out dozens of books at a time because she would love reading at least two books at a time, something that has carried over as she still couple a nonfiction book and a fiction book together. It got to the point to where she checked one hundred books, so the librarians called her parents, saying she was hoarding books. None were overdue, however.

“Lifting As We Climb” is a non-fiction book that was released in 2020. For African American females, the fight for the right to vote was just one battle.

An eye opening book which tells the overlooked and important story about black as a force in the suffrage movement, when the fellow suffragists didn’t accept them as equal partners in the struggle.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Alice Paul. The Women’s Rights Convention at Seneca Falls. The 1913 Women’s March in DC. The epic tale of the suffrage movement in the United States is always told, the most familiar leaders, speakers at the meetings, and participants in marches written about or pictured are typically white. However the true story is not monochromatic.

Women of color, particularly African American women, were battling for their right to vote and to get treated as full and equal citizens of America. Their battlefront was not just about gender. African American women were forced to deal with white abolitionist-suffragists that drew the line at sharing any power with their black sisters. They were forced to overcome exclusionary and deep racial prejudices which were rife in the American suffrage movement. And they were also forced to maintain their dignity (and safety) in a society which attempted to keep them down in its bottom ranks.

This is the empowering tale about African women that refused to accept any of this. Women in black church groups, black women’s improvement societies and social clubs, and black female sororities. Women that formed their own black suffrage associations when the white-dominated national suffrage groups rejected them. Women such as Mary Church Terrell, who was a founder of the National Association of Colored Women and of The NAACP; or Anna Jullia Cooper (an educator-activist) who was a champion of women getting a college education and the vote; or Ida B. Wells, who was a leader in the anti-lynching and the suffrage movements.

“Weightless: Making Space for My Resilient Body and Soul” is a non-fiction book that was released in 2022. A ruthlessly honest and poignant journey through cultural expectations of race, size, and gender, and toward a brighter future.

In such a funny, insightful, and whip-smart book, Evette explores the minefields that fat Black women are forced to navigate in the course of their everyday life. From her early experiences of getting harassed to adolescent self-discovery in internet chatrooms to a diagnosis with heart failure at just 29, Evette tracks her relationships with agoraphobia, sex, friendship, pop culture, motherhood, health, and self image.

Along the way, she shifts the curtain back in order to reveal the insidious and subtle forms of control and surveillance leveled at fat women. On dating sites, where bigger bodies are either fetishized or just rejected. While at the doctor’s office, where any health ailment is treated with a directive to lose weight. On TV, where fat characters are the asexual comedic relief. However Evette’s unflinching account of our deeply held prejudices is equaled by her own fierce belief in the power of self-love.

This is an unmissable portrait of one woman on a journey toward understanding our society and herself, this holds the mirror up to the world we live in and asks us to imagine the future that we deserve.