“We deserve to have our diverse cultures, skin tones, hair textures, and every distinct feature of ours celebrated.”

Andréa Butler helps put the “mag” in #BlackGirlMagic as editor-in-chief and publisher of Sesi — the only teen magazine for Black girls on the newsstand.

Launched into this world a month early, Andréa made her debut at Fort Belvoir Army Hospital in Virginia. Growing up a Marine Corps brat, she didn’t attend the same school more than two years in a row until college. Throughout all the moves, though, her love of reading and writing remained constant. And as a teen, she fell hard for magazines — having what her mom called “an intense obsession” with them (it was nearly impossible for her to leave a store without buying at least one).

But, she tired of reading magazines she couldn’t relate to — Essence was too old and she didn’t exactly see herself in the pages of Seventeen, YM, et al. One night, lying on her bedroom floor, flipping through a dozen or so old issues of the aforementioned teen mags, 17-year-old Andréa had a thought: “If nothing’s changed by the time I’m done with school, I’ll start one myself.”