I am self taught. I have been sketching my whole life. I took a few art classes here and there for painting. I learned all this on my own through Youtube. I have been painting for about three and a half years now.
Category Archive: Women
I have synesthesia which means my senses are all tangled up. For example, when I listen to music I experience sound as color, shape and texture. I was trying to show people what a song looks like. I sketched it out with paint. They wanted to keep it. That inspired me to keep painting. I originally started painting music; but, I have branched out from there.
A lot of people will see the number of books that I have written and will think that I started out on this journey purposefully; but, I didn’t on January 31, 2014, I woke up like any other Saturday. I thought I was just going to chill. I wrote twelve books.
I kill people in my books. I used to be a lawyer and an economics professor. I got sick. I had to do something to keep my mind off of it. I started writing books in my fifties.
We are both writers. I wrote a play and I have written other work as well. Most of my work has been for adults. Carmella has a fabulous history writing children’s books. We knew that it was a completely different genre. Plays for adults are one thing.
If I didn’t write the book, I don’t know what else I would do. Writing is so deeply engrained in me, that it would keep me up at night every night if I wasn’t getting this out there, if I wasn’t sharing this art.
We have seven uplifting and inspiring rhyming stories for children with positive messages. I used to home school. I didn’t see a lot of those books on the shelves written by people of color, about people of color, with positive messages. I decided to change that.
It is the story of her life. Her great grandmother was a slave. Deseree grew up in Mississippi during Jim Crow. It was very hard. She told some stories that were terrorizing.
I self publish these books because I saw a hole in the market for children that have mixed heritage. These books for kids that have two cultures.
I wrote the book to share my story and to be a solution to the problem. Everything that is in my book is what I went through, why I went through it and how I overcame it.
I did not start out to do all of this. My background is in journalism. I worked as a freelance journalist for a long time. I did digital marketing for a long time. I am an avid romance reader. One night two characters, the ones from my first book, showed up and would not leave me alone.
When I was young, I wrote for comfort. It is my stress reliever. I never imagined I would be doing it for business or a career. I just always did it for myself.
Zora’s House has a social justice mission. We believe that when women of color have what they need to disregard the status quo, to build lives and careers that recognize all of who they are, it is a better world for everybody.
My class is called R&B yoga flow. We do yoga to R&B and sometimes a little bit of jazz. We are teaching you to breathe and move in your body.
Finding out that this is an event that I can do. I like talking to people, being here all day and seeing people walk by and admire my work.
I love it! That is what I think is so great about this opportunity. I tell this to my students, too. Art is not something that hangs and you look at. It can be something that you interact with.
Not only is all my food inspired by the anime; but, at all of my pop-up events, I dress in cosplays. It creates a vibe where they are getting the food and seeing me and my friends dressed in costumes.
It is like I brought the outside to the inside of the vehicle. I have the fun world around me watching people giving me high fives and thumbs up.
I play with an all-women’s group called “Sistah Ngoma.” I am incorporating the men. When I incorporate the men, we call ourselves the “Spirit Drummers.” Ngoma is an African phrase that means song, drama and dance. I am working on the group being more multi-cultural.
My mother planted the earliest seed because she was really health conscious. When I was a sophomore in college in 1986, Dick Gregory did a lecture about why black folks eat the way we eat, why we are unhealthy and why we should go vegetarian. That started me on the path.
My book is called “Kaydee the Bumblebee” it is a children’s picture book, dedicated to my goddaughter, Kaylin. Kaydee is a feisty little bumblebee who has dreams. Everyone tells her everything that she can’t do. “They” the group of insects. Kaydee does it regardless. She uses positive self-talk and affirmations.
I started writing for leaders at organizations who are undergoing transformation, transition, acquisitions, new processes, rolling out new software, to help them keep their employees engaged while they are going through changes. Also, doing things outside the norm.
I am a living testimony of how good God has been to me. How He covered me when I was in a dessert serving in the US Army in Iraq and Kuwait.
I couldn’t control what happened with these sisters; but, I would carry them with me in my spirit and my soul. It has got to be us to tell our stories as black women. We do not deserve to die exhausted. We do not deserve to die not experiencing love the way God intended us to experience love.
We can’t help what life gives us. We can grow and rise above it. I am a product of rising above what the enemy has tried to bind me with. I refuse to be bound.
We wanted to create a safe space for black women to feel that they could show up as their full selves to find some sense of calm, healing, and community. We all felt like we gathered that from being in nature. We wanted to provide a space for other black women to come together to experience that as well.
Your job is to create laws. In order to be a good state rep, you need to show up to events, have meetings, have town halls, at churches (not just during election season).
I think I fall into a secular gospel sound. Negro spirituals formed a lot of our music. I named my guitar after Sister Rosetta Tharpe. She was a black woman in the 1910s and 1920s who was playing the electric guitar in bars (gospel songs).
Music is about trying to connect with people. There are so many ways to connect. We are here for those people who want to find a connection.
I help everybody that needs help. I know that sounds silly; but, there are underserved communities everywhere, underserved artists everywhere.
I go with a vibe. I want to show that we are royalty, we are united, and we are loved.
I am volunteering on behalf of the Franklin County Board of Commissioners Office of Diversity Equity and Inclusion. I am the Chief Economic Equity and Inclusion Officer. It is important for me to be here to support my black community.
I am part of the “Black Women Rise Poetry Collective”, which is a collective of black women poets in my city who perform poems and write poems. Who use poetry as their ministry.
I was amazed at how supportive and connected this group appeared to be.
Before and after each competitor, it appeared that group members cheered for them and genuinely wanted them to succeed.
I have been doing the Highland Games for 3 years. I got started because of whisky and questionable life choices.
I think I ranked number one in the world. I was 40 at the time. I started practicing from there. This is my third year. I just love the community. I love challenging myself.
My grandpa and my dad did Highland games. They were like, “you are the third kid and a daughter, so you are going to do this.” I have been doing it since I was about 15. This is my twentieth-year throwing.
My favorite event is the light weight for distance. I like it because I have a world record.
I was a Highland dancer for 8 years. The Highland Games encompasses bagpipe, drum, and dance competitions. What we do is part of the heavy athletic, but people commonly call it the Highland Games.
I love coming to the venue because you see a lot of awesome people, with all these different sports, no matter how obscure. It is pretty awesome to see all that.
I started training 4 years ago. I came 10 kg more than I started. It is going up very slowly. My personal record is 62 kg (136.687 pounds).
This is going on 25 years of being in charge. This is my twentieth year at the Arnold. I first started with 146 athletes worldwide. I now have over 20,000 athletes, in 26 different countries.
It is a lot of fun. It is a great way to stay active. There are really fun people to compete with. We are having more and more opportunities like this to compete at a high level.
I think that murals are my way of self-expression and protest. I have a new born; so, I’m not on the front lines. This is my way of having a voice in the fight. My message: is our goal is peace and equality.
It was a true collaborative mural. Most of the community collaborative murals I see have an image ahead of time and the community comes and paints by numbers. This is unique because it basically was stay in your block, and your block becomes a part of the bigger picture.
Typically, I am a middle weight competitor. For the Strongwoman pro series, it is an open weight class. I was able to put on a few extra pounds, which in turn helped me to hang out with the big girls a little better.
I just set the world record for the sandbag throw (40 pounds) over a 15 feet bar.
The yoke is my favorite, then farmers carry. I don’t like the dumbbell. Maybe, the best of the best is the stone.
I train four days a week, sometimes five days a week depending on what I have coming up for about two hours a day. The last day of the week I usually train three to four hours. This training cycle was about eight weeks long. I think that if I go too long, I burn out too quickly.
After losing 115 pounds, I felt like I had to run to fit America’s viewpoint of what women should do at that level of fitness. I ran one of every race. I finished with a marathon in 2013. After that, I wasn’t sure what to do. I had a coach introduce me to Strongman.
Everyone can do it. We allow novices, walk ons, different age groups, even children. It is for the whole family. You do not have to be Scottish.
It combines two different lifts. It is the snatch which you take from the floor. You bounce it off your hips and take it to above your head. It has a wide grip. Where the clean and jerk is taken from the floor. It has a closer grip. You stop on top of your shoulder. Then you do another movement called a jerk to take it above your head.
I went back to school after I was an established artist to get credentials. When God gives you raw talent and you start to see more that can be associated with that talent, we must do as much as we can with that talent.
All the pieces in the exhibit were handpicked. I did studio visits. I had long conversations with the artists to make sure that I am representing them the way that they want to be represented. I want to show as much of the evolution of their work as possible.
The radical civil rights movement was founded and organized by white folks (the Quakers). The book “CORE the philosophy of the Civil Rights Movement”, by Elliot Rudwick traces how he got involved. He followed the white folks (Quakers). There has always been a black movement outside of that. The first black in CORE was James Farmer.
It was important for me, as a black author and black self publisher to have black illustrators and African American main characters.
This piece is about the hope of the future in a cool kid that is a teen ager now. She is going to have to save the world because everyone else is too old to do it.
This piece is based on my heritage as a Navaho woman. I am showing different blankets that people wear or create.
Since I have year round allergies, I feel stuffy and my nose is running most of the time. My goal is to capture the aspect of being stuffy.
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