To top it off, she’s extremely generous with her time and advice. In fact, after seeing how she touched hundreds of women each week with her editor’s letter during her three-year stint as Editor in Chief at Honey magazine, DuBois Barnett started to hatch an outline for a book idea. This past September saw the fruits of her labor as she released Get Yours! The Girlfriends’ Guide to Having Everything You Ever Dreamed of and More.
“When I was the editor of Honey I used to write a column every month about my life,” she begins. “It was really personal, and I would talk about the obstacles I faced and embarrassing stories and stuff about my family, and I would tell my readers this is what I learned, this is what I think now about what happened to me and here’s what you can get from it.
“I was surprised by how much of a phenomenon that page became. I used to get hundreds of e-mails and phones calls every week from women who would tell me that my words touched them or changed their life. I wrote this book as a love letter to all the young women who read Honey and who wrote to me to tell me how much my words meant. Because that was not only gratifying for me as an editor, journalist, woman, but it gave me a mission and purpose in the universe.”
A Brown University graduate, DuBois Barnett also has an M.F.A. degree in creative writing from Columbia University and a certificate in fashion merchandising from Parson’s School of Design. After serving first as Fashion and Beauty Features Editor and then as Lifestyle Editor at Essence, she landed her sweet gig as Editor in Chief at Honey magazine.
Next stop, she was hired as the Managing Editor of Teen People, where she became the first African-American woman in the country to head a major mainstream magazine. Teen People folded in July 2006, and yet again Dubois Barnett would fall into another plum editorial position: this time as Deputy Editor in Chief of Harper’s Bazaar.
Amy has many tips for women about how to achieve success, but the pointer she starts off with is this: stop wasting so much time picking yourself apart.
“We pick ourselves apart to the point where we feel uncomfortable in our own skin,” she relays. “When you do that it becomes impossible to move with confidence through the world. At the end of the day whatever you have is what you have. Be comfortable with it. The more comfortable you are the more confidence you’ll exude, the more people will feel that and the better you as a result will feel about yourself because you’ve received what it is you put out there.”
Motivated by her personal mission to empower women, DuBois Barnett hopes to spread her formula of achievement to women everywhere.
“The main thing that I want readers to take away is that success is a mindset,” she concludes. “Living your dreams is all about preparing yourself to achieve. My book is about walking through the world with confidence with the expectation that you’ll be able to do what you want.”
Get Yours! The Girlfriends’ Guide To Having Everything You Ever Dreamed Of and More is currently available. For more information, visit www.amyduboisbarnett.com
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