Last year, a friend of mine asked me for a recommendation for a magazine targeted specifically towards black teen girls and teens for his daughter.  I paused – Essence didn’t feel like the right thing – it serves a broader, older demographic.  And none of the so-called mainstream teen magazines felt like the right thing either.  I needed unapologetically black and decidedly teen and started my search for that thinking surely this magazine exists by now.  In my search for media that met that criteria, I found Andréa Butler’s brain child: Sesi Magazine.

Follow Sesi on Twitter @Sesimag

As Editor-in-Chief and Publisher, Andréa describes Sesi as “Covering the Black Girl’s Mainstream.”  The magazine launched in 2008 and re-launched with consistent quarterly print publication in 2012.  She’s faced challenges but stood by her vision for almost a decade now.  And in checking out the team page on the Sesi Magazine website, you will see that she has assembled a whole team of black women who are also dedicated to making sure black girls can enjoy media that addresses them directly and not as a side dish.  She has cover features from the young black celebs that black teens recognize and covers a range of topics, thus avoiding the typical teen mag tendency to over-index on articles on looks and sex.

Andrea is a former teacher and is an alumna of  The University of North Carolina at Greensboro and and Kent State University.  She has some good advice for to-be-entrepreneurs in this profile on her a few years ago on aftercollege.com.

Please visit the site to learn more and to either subscribe or to speak to the thousands of subscribers with an advertisement.  You can also follow Sesi on Facebook or Twitter.

Featured Image by Jessica Gressa