I had the pleasure of catching up with one of my best friends on Easter Sunday right before I began my current job. We hadn’t seen each other in some time so it was great to hear about how she was balancing things with her career, her marriage, and being a Mommy to two beautiful…
Tag: inspiration
One Bad Alto and God’s Grace
One of my favorite singers in the world is a woman from one of my home churches in Baltimore named Sheila Thomas. Sis. Sheila wasn’t one of those emotional singers who wailed and sweated or reared back when she hit a good note or even closed her eyes if the song got real good to…
Getting Over New York
Anyone within a 10-mile radius of me in the last decade has probably heard me wax quite poetic about my desire to become the next Susan Taylor in the editorial world. (If you don’t know about the AWESOMENESS that is Susan Taylor, the former, fantabulous editor-in-chief of Essence, I need you to stop reading this…
The Complicated Song of America
Like most people, I find it very difficult to wrap my mind around senseless acts of violence like the bombing at the Boston Marathon yesterday. While I offer my deepest prayers and condolences, sometimes it just doesn’t feel like enough. That’s when I just have to dig in a little deeper and trust that even…
Confidence is a MotherF*&%$@
(For all my sanctified friends, please get to the end of the post before you start praying for me. Well, pray for me anyway, but just pretend I didn’t start a blog post with an abbreviated curse word for the next 10 minutes. ) One of my favorite moments of my 30s thus far was…
Choose Your Own Adventure
In a few days, I will be taking on my fourth career opportunity, and I cannot explain how super, wicked excited I am. I even started lining up my outfits for the first week. (I’m totally in my new kid on the first day of school mode!). While most of the feedback I have gotten…
Finding Your Own Kool-Aid
Thanks to Jim Jones and the Jonestown Massacre in the late 1970s, the term “drinking the Kool-Aid” most often has a very negative connotation for most people in this country. While I don’t want any of my dear readers getting caught up in no crazy cults with animal sacrifices or groups where you have to…
Running Down a Dream with Tom Petty
In a normal world, good Apostolic-raised girls like me and Tom Petty don’t mix. But that all changed for me in the Summer of 2002. I was a freshly minted, Morgan State University graduate, and I was cutting my editing teeth at a six-month internship in at the National Education Association. I was enjoying the…
Year 34: Allow Me to Re-Introduce Myself
If I didn’t define myself for myself, I would be crushed into other people’s fantasies for me and eaten alive. –Audre Lorde A few weeks ago, I was putting together a small sampling of some of my best editorial work for a presentation. As I was sifting through piles of magazines, books, and articles, I…
YOU. ARE. A.WRITER.
About three years ago, I was at the end of the end of my rope at my former job. I had been battling with my former boss for three days about 250 words (!!!!) for the back cover of a book. I was now on my third draft of this cover copy and I didn’t…
What Are You Doing With Your En-Dash?
As an editor nothing makes me happier than properly used punctuation. Without an appropriate period, comma, semicolon, and my favorite, the exclamation mark, the words, numbers, and symbols of our expressions would just be a jumble of marks with no significance. So which one is most important? The period that helps to end a sentence?…
The Ink Well 