Shay Stewart-Bouley, Black Girl in Maine Media

Born and raised on a combination of big city attitude and Midwestern sensibility, Chicago native Shay Stewart-Bouley, also known as Black Girl in Maine (or BGIM), had to learn a bit of Yankee ingenuity when she relocated to Maine in 2002. After a brief foray into education, she brought her socially-minded work from Chicago, where she worked with the homeless, to Maine by working with low-income and at-risk youth in southern Maine. She is currently the executive director of Community Change Inc., a nearly 50-year-old anti-racism organization based in Boston that organizes and educates for racial equity with a specific focus on working with white people. Shay has been blogging since 2008, frequently on matters of social justice and systemic racism, through her Black Girl In Maine website and, in 2011, she won a New England Press Association Award for her writing on race and diversity for the Portland Phoenix. Her writing also has been featured in a variety of Maine and national publications as well as several anthologies. In November 2016, she gave a TEDx talk called “Inequity, Injustice… Infection.”  She is graduate of both DePaul University and Antioch University New England, and even though she works in Boston now, she is indeed still BGIM, continuing to reside in Maine.