Alumnae Profile

Tara Roberts ’91

What exactly, does it mean to be fierce? If you ask Tara L. Roberts ’91, she won’t say ruthless, raging, or hard-hearted. She’ll tell you in the mellowest tone that “you are fierce when you have proudly and boldly identified who you are, and when what other people think about you ceases to make a difference.”

Roberts is publisher of Fierce, a new quarterly magazine that “celebrates the multitude of voices and writing styles of young women around the country, and tackles topics that women talk about, but that you won’t always see in print.” It makes a point of spotlighting the voices of women of color, because they’ve so often been “relegated to the back of the bus.”

The magazine has a modest 15,000 circulation, but a confident presence. Visually, its pages are a graphic indulgence of wall-to-wall pigment and texture and larger-than-life photos. Editorially, too, the book is anything but sheepish. Fierce is unapologetically in-your-face, but never in a caustic or deprecating way.

Standard in every issue are shards of hard-to-believe news (there’s actually a Japanese comic-book “hero” called Rapeman), political commentary on hot-button topics (like gay marriage), and a fair dose of sex-talk (Fierce has a regular column called “G-spot”). There are in-depth travelogues—often of the personal, soul-searching kind; investigative reports about female trailblazers the world over; in-the-trenches tales of, for example, bikers, boxers, and tattooed women; and profiles of everyone from rapper Missy Elliott to Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton. At the core of Fierce is a very basic, rock-solid affirmation: Women are good, dammit, and here’s proof.

Roberts exemplifies the type of woman portrayed in her publication, says Linda Villarosa, her boss when Roberts worked at Essence: “Fierce reflects exactly the person Tara is—someone who doesn’t like to be hemmed in by conventionality and who is spirited, open-minded, and big-hearted.”

Roberts—who got her master’s in publishing studies from NYU—was lifestyle editor at Essence for several years, worked briefly at Heart & Soul (a black women’s health and fitness magazine), and taught journalism for a year at Syracuse University. These experiences, she says, “strengthened my commitment to women’s issues, and to authentic women’s voices being heard and seen through the media.” But she craved a magazine with “features that really moved people to action—that got them right in their heart and inspired them.” And she knew it had to be her own.

Roberts drafted a road map for how the magazine (working name: She) would be. “I wanted it to be a little more active, a little more outside of people’s comfort zone” than other magazines, she says. In January 2001, having put her Syracuse house and Brooklyn apartment on the market, Roberts went home to Atlanta to sort things out—or, as her mother put it, to “decide where you want to be in the world.”

“I came back to Atlanta not planning to stay. But when I got here, I was amazed at how much the city had changed… People from all over the world are living here now.” And, good news for a publisher, “there’s this huge creative community of writers, designers, and photographers.” She decided to stay put and launch her magazine from there.

No one else, Roberts says, was publishing what she had in mind: “a no-kidding multicultural magazine. I thought, Why can’t there be a space for a magazine that’s strong and thoughtful and doesn’t include ‘ten tips on how to slim your thighs’? What if I could have a magazine that believed every woman is perfect, just the way she is? And what would our conversation be if it wasn’t about all this stuff we’re led to believe is wrong with us? Who could we be for the world? I wanted to create a global sisterhood of activists.”

The test was translating the ideas in her head into something that would work in print. Bit by bit, she pulled together the first issue, centering it around the theme of “sisterhood”; subsequent issues have explored “renegade,” “spirit,” “warrior,” and “the sex industry.”

Roberts didn’t know how the magazine—by now renamed Fierce—would be received. “I knew at least my friends would read it,” she says. But she was bolstered by some “amazing responses” from readers who felt an immediate connection to the Fierce mission and compared it to “finding water in the desert.” (Utne Reader, meanwhile, nominated Fierce for its Best New Magazine of the Year award.)

But Roberts has also heard her magazine’s contents described as vulgar, anti-Semitic, even pornographic. “The people who don’t like it think it goes past too many boundaries,” she shrugs. The criticism “actually helps us figure out our audience. Sometimes it just means there’s a part of their lives they’re not comfortable with.” Yet. Because Roberts is all about changing that.

The magazine’s target readership is women twenty-one to forty. A Fierce reader is “all over the place” in terms of race, religion, sexuality, and geographic location, Roberts says. “But she has in common a point of view about society and her role in it. Our reader is committed to the transformation of women, and in some way she’s bucking the status quo.”

“My goal is to be a bridge between [“alternative” magazines] Bitch and Bust and [mainstream magazines] Jane and Marie Claire. It’s kind of the space held by Ms.—especially [in the minds of] second-wave feminists,” she says. And she hopes the magazine will “get thicker and thicker and thicker, so it takes a while to get through every issue—like a great book.”

Besides being the magazine’s visionary, Roberts is also its primary financial backer. “That’s why we can’t do as much as I’d like to,” she says bluntly. David Rubin, dean of Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Public Communications—who rooted for Roberts, knowing she had “the energy and the intellect” to start her own magazine—says it’s “very, very hard to start a new magazine without the backing of a major media company.” But Roberts is committed to her vision, and there’s no angst in her voice when she declares, “It’s just not time for us to die … What we really need now is an investor.”

The magazine accepts some advertising, an obvious revenue-generator and survival pill, from socially and politically conscious companies such as Luna Bar (“the whole nutrition bar for women”), Lunapads (maker of alternative menstrual products), and Smitten Kitten (a “gender-friendly” sex-toy store). And Roberts is looking for more.

Partnering with like-minded companies could also boost the “FiercePlanet Tour,” a grassroots awareness-building project that takes the handful of Fierce staffers to colleges around the country. Roberts hopes to roll through campuses next fall on a ten-city tour, “conducting workshops on activism, cooperative economics, independent media-making, and self-love.”

Fierce’s slogan, “Too bold for boundaries,” is a personal as well as professional mantra for Roberts. “I’ve been very challenged [to accept] this idea of me as a businesswoman and a leader. I still think, ‘I’m a creative visionary—can’t I just come up with the idea and somebody else can run it?’ Who we really are is so much greater than what we allow ourselves to be. We fit ourselves into these too-small boxes. Who I am is a leader, pretending that I’m not one. When I stop pretending, I’m like, ‘Yeah, of course—it fits like a glove.’”

Then there’s the ever-present fierce factor. “Am I fierce?” Roberts repeats the question coming at her. “Surrre . . . ,” she says, dragging her answer out, as if still considering it. “I think it’s an ongoing process. So yes, I’m fierce—and getting fiercer.”

Photo credit: Jim Gipe, Pivot Media

As you go along your own road of life, you will, if you aim high enough, also meet resistance, for as Robert Kennedy once said, ‘If there’s nobody in your way, it’s because you’re not going anywhere.’ But no matter how tough the opposition may seem, have courage still—and persevere. — Madeleine K. Albright, U.S. secretary of state, commencement address, 1997