A Writer’s Best Gift, a guest post by Karen Valby

Readers always ask me how I, a white woman whose dance background began and ended in pre-K, came to write The Swans of Harlem, about five glorious Black ballerinas who cracked open the stodgy tradition of ballet during the Civil Rights Movement. And like books have front and back covers, so too does the story of making one. Mine begins and ends with the gift of my daughters.
I am the white adoptive mother of two Black girls. By the time each could walk, I had them signed up for dance classes. The sight of their rolly bellies and thighs wrapped in leotard and tights remains one of my life’s great joys. But it wasn’t an appetite for cuteness that led our family to Ballet Afrique, the only Black dance studio in Austin, TX. It was the relief of seeing my girls surrounded by other Black children looking fondly upon themselves in the studio mirror, with a Black teacher at the head of the room clucking for their attention.
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Dreams grow from example, so I made sure to fill my young dancers’ shelves with each new Misty Copeland book and of course her Firebird doll. My oldest taped an autographed picture of Copeland from American Ballet Theater’s production of “Swan Lake” to the door of their shared bedroom. She was almost as big a star in their eyes as Santa Claus.
So, we held Copeland up on high not just because she was great and gracious and beautiful—all of which are true—but because we believed she was the first Black ballerina to make history on the classical stage. It wasn’t until I met the Swans—the great Lydia Abarca, Sheila Rohan, Gayle McKinney-Griffith, Karlya Shelton, and Marcia Sells—and they told me about the Legacy Council they had formed to remind a careless world of their important, triumphant, occasionally heartbreaking work that I realized how terribly wrong we all were. These women, under the visionary leadership of Arthur Mitchell, helped launch the rocket ship that was the Dance Theatre of Harlem during a time when the Black body and temperament was still seen as incompatible with the classical stage. With every standing ovation, every breathless review, and every sold-out theater, they proved again and again how much more beautiful ballet was with them in it. And, as the Swans explained, they were a part of a grand tradition that included scores of other unheralded talents. Ignorance locks up the imagination. Education sets it free.
The Swans of Harlem is about the gift of sisterhood, how the company of female friendship can sustain and affirm over a lifetime. It’s about the gift of talent, and how five young Black girls refused to turn their backs on their natural talent despite a world pressuring them otherwise. It’s about the gift of opportunity, and how without the stage Mitchell provided for his dancers the world may have been deprived of their artistry.
How to explain my own layers of gratitude at play during this great project? The gifts of my daughters in my life to begin with, and a Black dance studio in theirs. The shining example of Copeland at the beginning of their lives as young dancers, and now those of the Swans beaming behind her. The trust and friendship of five brave women, who as young girls made their wildest dreams come true and now reunited in their third acts have insisted that their fantastical pasts be honored as fact. The experience of being in the room when Copeland met the Swans for the first time and bearing witness to the miracle of generations finally coming together.
I dedicated The Swans of Harlem to my daughters. In interviews, I described the act of writing this book as an extension of mothering. The book is a love letter for them. May it live on crowded shelves.


On my 50th birthday, on a brief stop at home during the book tour celebrating the Swans’ 50 years of sisterhood, my teenager surprised me with her own gift. Without my knowing it, she’d read my entire book. And now, in a profound loop of generosity, she was presenting me with an annotated copy of the work I’d committed myself to over the last four years. The pages were festooned with 95 brightly colored sticky notes. She’d used five different colors of highlighters on the text. She’d underlined the words she didn’t recognize—words like “tokenized” and “zealous” and “vaudevillian”—so she could look them up in the dictionary. She’d brought her specific Gen Z teenage mentality to the margins, cheering along the Swans’ teenage selves in the margins, agitating at the forces trying to squash their growth and greatness. “There were always Black classical dancers in America,” I wrote. “They just never got on stage.” Her response: “Mic drop.”
What in this world is more generous than a reader? There are no books without them.

Bio: Karen Valby is the author of two books of nonfiction: The Swans of Harlem and Welcome to Utopia: Notes from a Small Town. A contributing editor for Vanity Fair, she also writes for the New York Times, O Magazine, Glamour, Fast Company, and EW, where she spent fifteen years writing about culture. She and her family live in Austin, Texas, where her daughters study dance at Ballet Afrique. Visit her online at karenvalby.com.
Links:
https://www.facebook.com/karen.valby
https://www.instagram.com/kvalby
Filed under: Nonfiction

About Karen Jensen, MLS
Karen Jensen has been a Teen Services Librarian for almost 32 years. She created TLT in 2011 and is the co-editor of The Whole Library Handbook: Teen Services with Heather Booth (ALA Editions, 2014).
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