Remembering Louise Meriwether

Yesterday we lost great novelist Louise Meriwether at her great age of 100.

If You Read One Book Today: The New Black Woman by Marita Golden

I'm so happy to wish all a beautiful World Mental Health Day by sharing this book that is so important to me. Don't see The New Black Woman and believe you have to be a Black woman to read it. Do you know a Black woman? Do you love a Black woman? Do you work with one? Do you ask one to be a good neighbor and water your plants or sit your cat while you travel? Do you have one or more teaching your children, being their second mothers all day in school as their job while you probably make way more money at yours? Do you order from her restaurant and brag on how good her food is? Do you have one or a few in your book club, professional group, gym, lecture hall or church pew?

Choosing to Remember Black Women Were at the Oscars…

I'm choosing to remember my black sisters who pepped up the long-criticized stale show and it was noticeable. Black women can lead, we can follow and we can uplift others with unmatched grace and poise.

Celebrating Gwendolyn Brooks on World Book Day

Gwendolyn Brooks was the very first real famous writer (the gods!) I helped organize a special event for. My ad hoc University of Chicago "sorority" for women of color on campus was blessed enough to get Ms. Brooks as the first guest speaker we ever booked, to launch our name and mission on campus. What a launch it was!

Justice for Jelani Day

For a young black man in central Illinois plains to just go missing from his university didn't even make sense and almost didn't make any national noise. His mother changed that.

Halle Won November, maybe the year

Way to make everybody feel bad when the #1 trending movie over the gluttonous, lazy Thanksgiving Weekend shows us a 50something sister doing crossfit.

“Passing,” or your wknd and Nov. 10 sorted

I was so excited at the first impression I got for this book's film adaptation on its way. I'm an English major/major book nerd, so yes, the great Nella Larsen's Passing is a novel to define my college days. If you were a woman with melanin and not going into medicine or science as a career, you loved Passing. It was your Dynasty and Real Housewives franchise, yet so aged and psychologically impressive it was totally okay to call this soap opera a favorite novel. Oh, the drama..