We were lucky to catch up with Ravynn Stringfield recently and have shared our conversation below.

Ravynn, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. We’d love to hear about the things you feel your parents did right and how those things have impacted your career and life.

My parents always managed to operate in a way where I felt completely supported but also they gave me enough space to try out things creatively without interference. As a kid, it was normal for me to disappear upstairs in our house for a few hours and come back down with a new project: a newspaper I’d made for my dad about what he’d missed while he was at work, a collection of Sunday paper comics arranged into a book, a novel that I wrote over the course of a summer. They made sure the house was filled with books and creative tools. Nothing was off limits. My dad was an engineer and I always wanted to use his special drafting pencils. He never minded sharing. If I decided that I needed special paper to make paper dolls, my mom had no problem sharing her scrapbooking stash. My dad even printed out the hundred page novel I wrote when I was ten at work and bound it for me. I still have it. Everything creative I did, my parents valued it without overhyping it. They treated my productions as seriously and important as anything an adult would make from a really young age.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

I am a writer and a scholar. Right now, folks mostly know me for my two young adult novels, Love Requires Chocolate (2024) and Love in 280 Characters or Less (2025). But Love in 280 evolved from my PhD dissertation project. While I was an American Studies graduate student at William & Mary studying Black women and girl in fantasy new media narratives, I became interested in how Black girls self-make online. I loved thinking about how Black girls use fantastic and digital spaces as these sprawling landscapes on which to build. I wrote Love in 280 Characters or Less as a digital epistolary bildungsroman to explore what things come up when Black girls are coming of age, building a sense of self online. The questions were too big even for a dissertation. I wrote about Black girls, digital spaces, popular culture and new media from different vantage points wherever I could: on my blog, Black Girl Does Grad School; in magazines like Catapult and Shondaland; my academic writing that appeared in venues like Digital Humanities Quarterly; and even in visual art that I started to make in 2020. I find I am most proud that I am a multi-faceted creator, willing to explore questions however feels right.

Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?

I was fairly popular on Twitter from 2017-2022 when I was regularly blogging at Black Girl Does Grad School and publishing my creative nonfiction. The main thing that helped build my audience was a regular publishing schedule and consistent engagement with readers. I published on Black Girl Does Grad School every Sunday of the academic semester around 10 AM. Folks new they would get new content then, and I made sure to share the link to Twitter. From there, folks easily could circulate the post and it generated conversation, that I could engage with. My blog at the time was very curated for graduate students, people who were trying to learn the “hidden curriculum.” Having a niche blog topic was a great way to building a following, even if I talked about other things on Twitter. After a while, my followers learned about some of my other interests: comics, other types of popular culture, Black girl digital culture, and they followed me as I began writing about other things in different venues. The biggest piece of advice I’d give you is to stay consistent. That doesn’t mean you have to live online. But consistency is regular engagement. If you drop off, it’s more about whether you come back.

Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?

I am committed to creating and championing art across genres primarily for Black girls who are told they are too much, difficult, abrasive, stuck up, loud. I want to make art to let them know they are loved exactly as they are. I am committed to making art for Black women who are healing their inner child that had to grow up without anyone writing these stories for them. I aspire to paint portraits of a wide range of Blackness, girlhoods, womanhoods, sexualities, body types and abilities. The stories I create will be thoughtful, artful, expansive, multilayered, and clearly reference the lineage and histories that without which, my words would not exist. As I tell these stories, I aspire to remain connected to the people for whom I write and move through the various spaces I enter with kindness and respect. I aim to collaborate with intention and create with those who I share values and who will challenge me to grow. I will make sure to hold the door open for those coming in after me and offer what I can.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.ravynnkstringfield.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/RavynnKaMia
• Other: Threads: @RavynnKaMia

Image Credits

Rosey Lee, Micah Ariel Asante, KaLyn Coghill, Vanessa Anyanso, Ben Lockhart, Tangie Augustin,