N.J. girl behind #1000BlackGirlBooks gets dream job

Marley Dias is just 11 but she's already an editor for a major media outlet Watch video

When Marley Dias started her #1000BlackGirlBooks social media campaign to collect books featuring black girls as main characters, she didn't expect to exceed her goal of a thousand books. 

Dias, an Essex County middle-schooler, came up with the campaign last year after becoming frustrated with the lack of black, female main characters in books she had to read for school, the ones filled with "white boys and their dogs." 

But the effort drew a surplus of books -- more than 7,000 so far -- and a significant amount of attention from national media. Marley wound up a guest on "The Ellen DeGeneres Show" and later got to meet Oprah Winfrey and Michelle Obama. 

Now the 11-year-old from West Orange has been made an editor-in-residence for Elle.com, which on Monday launched Marley Mag, a zine of her very own. 

"When you see a character you can connect with, if they learn a specific lesson, you're more likely to apply that to your life," Dias told NJ Advance Media in January when talking about the impetus behind her book campaign. Dias, then a sixth grader at Thomas A. Edison Middle School, said her ultimate goal was to edit her own pop culture and lifestyle magazine. 

"In the blink of an eye, I've gone from being a book nerd in West Orange, New Jersey, to an Editor-in-Residence in New York City," Dias wrote in a welcome letter for Elle.com. "I've always said that books have taken me on many adventures, but none of those adventures have been quite like this one. This isn't a dystopian novel or a fantasy. It's my real life. I, Marley Emerson Dias, have gotten the chance of a lifetime. I'm creating a brand-new zine for one of the most-read magazines in the world."

Dias, who interviewed writer-director Ava DuVernay and ballet dancer Misty Copeland for her Elle zine, ran a pitch meeting at the magazine this past summer. She was also interviewed by Melissa Harris-Perry, Elle's editor-at-large. 

"Every story needs to be told, in every way possible, so that everyone can get the information that they need," she told Harris-Perry. "And that's very similar to what I do with my campaign."

The Essex County tween donated the first 1,000 books she collected to the Retreat Primary and Junior School and library in Jamaica, where her mother grew up. Extra books went to Dias' old school, St. Cloud Elementary in West Orange. 

Drawing on all the book donations Dias received, her mother, Janice Johnson Dias, president of the GrassROOTS Community Foundation -- a West Orange-based social action organization co-founded by Black Thought, emcee for The Roots -- whose mission it is to improve the health and well-being of women and girls, created a "1,000 Black Girl Books" resource guide for parents, teachers and students, which details the reading level of each title.