If you feel like you’re seeing Michelle Obama everywhere these days, get used to it. With the release of her acclaimed memoir, Becoming, plus a nine-city book tour with crowds rivaling any her friends Beyoncé and Oprah might attract, she’s successfully transitioned from former First Lady to bona fide phenomenon. Very…

“The only way you are really ever going to be truly content is if you are constantly evolving,” says Kelis in Essence magazine. And she knows a bit about evolution, first hitting our radar in the early aughts as a genre-defying singer-songwriter, and evolving in the years since into a chef, cookbook author and farmer.

Leave it to Essence to remind us what black excellence looks like on both sides of the camera. Making their contribution to a season of intense black girl magic—where we are covering a full 50 percent of the 2018 fall fashion issues—the legendary black women’s magazine shows us exactly how excellent a product by a…

1. At some point during the two-hour layover at O’Hare International Airport on my trip from Pittsburgh to New Orleans last weekend, a supernatural force compelled me to glance up from my laptop and scan the gate around me. There was a shift in the space-time continuum that the universe was attempting to alert me to…

She may have taught us all the “pleasure principle,” but beloved icon Janet Jackson’s happiness didn’t come as easily as a song and dance. In an exclusive essay and cover story for Essence magazine’s first-ever Happiness issue, the living legend—who will also headline the 2018 Essence Festival on Sunday, July…

Brown, body-positive and beautiful in brilliant hues—that’s Danielle Brooks inside the pages of May’s Essence magazine, where the Orange Is the New Black actress models a spectrum of vibrant looks styled by Fashion and Beauty Director Julee Wilson.

By now it’s no secret that we love, love, love Grown-ish star, young activist and all-around brilliant bae (Harvard, y’all) Yara Shahidi. And clearly we’re not the only ones, since our sisters over at Essence are featuring the always “it” girl on the cover of their April issue!

Essence Communications Inc., the 48-year-old mutliplatform brand that owns Essence magazine and the annual Essence Festival, has gone back to black (ownership), having been acquired by Essence Ventures LLC, an independent African-American-owned company, Essence Ventures announced in a press release.

The Democratic Party has experienced an 11 percent drop in support from black women, while “the percentage of black women who said neither party represents them jumped from 13 percent in 2016 to 21 percent in 2017,” according to the 2017 Power of the Sister Vote poll, conducted by the Black Women’s Roundtable, an…

It was October 2011. I was in New York City for an Essence magazine photo shoot and feature on relationship bloggers—a collective that included Demetria Lucas (A Belle in Brooklyn), Jozen Cummings (Until I Get Married) and Anslem Samuel (Naked With Socks On).