Team Spirit
I started out in this field working as a brand messaging manager for an Atlanta marketing and communications firm, where I crafted high-impact messages that increased client market share, kept customers engaged, and launched new companies and their wares. Every day, I played in the sandbox with colorful designers, marketing gurus, and production brainiacs. Lessons learned in their company still apply: teamwork trumps solo work every time; mid-course feedback makes the final product stronger; and community struggle is often the precursor to something great, so don’t give up.
A Passion with Up- and Downsides
My love affair with words can cut both ways. On the one hand, I carry a grim reputation in my family for being the can’t-help-myself grammar police. In our family group chat, I’m that annoying soul who wails when the word “positive” appears as a noun. (Folks, it’s an adjective.) And when a press secretary on TV outlines policies with “Firstly…” followed by “…and Point B,” my ears straight-up bleed.
Hot Tip
Grammar policing the family group chat is misery for everyone.
Lest you think that I’m a Debbie Downer with words, a song lyric can totally send me. I read a poem before sipping morning coffee. I will never tire of seeing my kids scrawl “I love you, mama” on a just-because sticky note. So while grammar policing the group chat is misery for everyone, it turns out wordsmithing is a wicked asset in my work. Context is everything, right?
With a Master’s degree in conflict transformation, I served as executive director for a Boston-area nonprofit. Together with a dynamite team, I ushered the organization through a period of tremendous growth and community-building, putting the power of words to use in training design and delivery, public presentations, fundraising, talent recruitment, partnerships, coalition building, legislative efforts, and grant writing. More on that rewarding chapter appears in my LinkedIn work history.
Origins
As a 9-year-old, I kept a journal. It was pink, and it’s now water-stained. But even then, I understood that words were powerful, and that those pages were strong enough to hold the crosswinds of my days. Thus flowed accounts of sister disputes, parental grievances, developing crushes, and anguish about which fruit trees to save during drought. In high school, I submitted a fiction assignment where the twilight sun “chinned” on the horizon; my teacher — a stern Englishwoman who guarded approval up her sleeve, somewhere north of her used tissues — placed a smiley face in the margin. Triumph.
Nowadays
When not jamming on a client deadline, I serve on the board of a nonprofit raising scholarship funds for OVC students in Botswana. I chase two kids and an energetic Goldendoodle (see photo bomb, above) in the general vicinity of Durham, North Carolina. I’m also a wannabe runner, I yearn for more travel, and I bake irresistible granola.
For all you visually engaged folks out there, I sketched a few things I love:
