Sisterfriends: Portraits of Sisterly Love - Tapa dura

A "sister"is so many things -- someone who was born to your parents, your best friend, the woman you shared love, hope, or heartbreak with...and the women in Sisterfriends are all those, and more. A collage of impressions of African-American women both well-known and unknown, the essays in Sisterfriends tell beautiful stories of sisters, whether related by blood or bonded by fate. Crossing economic, social, and geographic boundaries, these sisters support each other emotionally, financially, and physically. The stories they tell are uplifting, funny, and sometimes heartbreaking. From singer Mary J. Blige and her sister LaTonya, who moved her entire family into Mary's mansion to manage her career, to Andrea and Lorelei Williams, who grew up in a one-room studio in Harlem and often didn't have food or electricity, to Bethann Hardison and her friend Marta Vargas, who share the bond of sisterhood as friends, Sisterfriends mines the whole experience in the words of its women. Iyanla Vanzant, Gayle King, and bell hooks contribute their own sister stories that compel, provoke, and ultimately illuminatthe fascinating relationship of women who call themselves "sister."

Native Chicagoan and Pulitzer Prize winner Michelle V. Agins is a staff photojournalist for The New York Times. Her photographs have appeared in Essence, Sports Illustrated, Ebony, and Jet. She is featured in Songs of My People and Photographs of Hope. The coauthor of Rookie, a children's book on the WNBA player Tamika Whitmore, Michelle has won regional and national awards including the Gordon Parks Award for Broken Promises, a story of indigent people living along the Mississippi Delta. She now lives in Brooklyn with her family.