Sally Nuamah

press release: A Room of One's Own is thrilled to welcome DSally Nuamah, author of How Girls Achieve!

How Girls Achieve points out a simple and overlooked truth: most schools never had girls in mind to begin with. That is why the world needs what Sally Nuamah calls “feminist schools,” deliberately designed to provide girls with achievement-oriented identities. And she shows how these schools would help all students, regardless of their gender. A compelling and inspiring scholar who has founded a nonprofit to test her ideas, Nuamah reveals that developing resilience is not a gender-neutral undertaking. Preaching grit doesn’t help girls; it actively harms them. Drawing on her deep immersion in classrooms in the United States, Ghana, and South Africa, Nuamah calls for a new approach: creating feminist schools that will actively teach girls how and when to challenge society’s norms, and allow them to carve out their own paths to success.

Sally A. Nuamah is a scholar, activist, and filmmaker. She has received numerous awards, including the Gates Millennium scholarship and the Black Women Organized for Political Action’s Under 40 Award in Education, and was selected a Change-Maker by the White House. HerStory, her award-winning documentary on girls and education in Ghana, has been screened across the world and is accessible through Discovery Education. She began the TWII Foundation to provide funding for girls striving to be first in their families to go to college. Most recently, Nuamah was named a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University and a Women and Public Policy fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School. She is currently assistant professor at the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University.