The whole
story

When I was about five years old, my grandfather drove people to the polls to vote. He was a retired coal miner in Appomattox, Virginia — the small, rural town where I was born and raised, and where the Civil War ended. Most of the people he picked up were elderly Black women. They would reach into the back seat and hand me starlight mints, and in between the rides my grandfather would talk to me about the importance of voting. About why it mattered especially for Black people. About what it had cost to earn that right and what it would cost to lose it.

He passed away about a year after that car ride. But I have never forgotten it. I didn’t have the language for it at five, but I understood something essential: that my rights were fragile, and that I would have to defend them. That understanding has shaped every job I have taken, every class I have taught, every room I have stood in, and every stage I have spoken from.

That is where this story starts. Not with the doctorate. Not with the government title. With a little girl, a retired coal miner, and a bag of starlight mints.

I grew up in Appomattox surrounded by four generations of family — my mother, my grandfather, my great-grandmother, my great-aunt and great-uncle. We grew our own food. We had a hog farm when I was very small. We spent a lot of time outside. And we were always in church — my family was one of the founding families of Mount Airy Baptist Church, established in 1870 by my ancestors on the same land where they had been enslaved.

I was a country girl, a working-class girl, a queer girl who didn’t know yet that she was queer, a Black girl learning to read from Dick and Jane books that didn’t look anything like her or her family. I went to school and church with the same people my entire childhood. I learned early that relationships matter, that you can’t cancel people in a small town because you will see them at Walmart, and that community is not just a nice idea — it is a survival skill.

I did not set out to become a speaker. I set out to make sure people have what they need. That is what my grandfather taught me, and it is what every job I have ever taken has been about.

I started with AmeriCorps Public Allies, learning how to build community and public service from the inside. I worked for the National Conference for Community and Justice, then for GLSEN — the national organization behind Pride Alliances in schools across the country. I started doing LGBTQ+ advocacy work around 2007 or 2008, in part because there were not many Black and brown faces doing that work, and I felt that young people needed to see us there.

I worked with LGBTQ+ youth in foster care at Prince George’s County Department of Social Services. I built programs at George Mason University, served as Interim Director of Diversity, Inclusion and Multicultural Education, and eventually became Associate Director of the LGBTQ Resource Center at Georgetown University. I arrived at Georgetown four months before the pandemic shut the campus down, and spent two years building community with students I had mostly never met in person. I did not see the tulips on Healy Lawn until my third spring there.

I served as Executive Director of Hope in a Box, a national nonprofit that puts LGBTQ+-inclusive books into the hands of educators in rural and Title I schools. I have trained over 1,700 educators, social service providers, and youth. I have lobbied on Capitol Hill. I have trained the DC Metropolitan Police. I have facilitated cultural consulting for a Broadway-caliber theater production.

In January 2021, I became Montgomery County’s first LGBTQ+ Liaison — the bridge between the county executive and the LGBTQ+ community, its parents, allies, and educators. In my first months on the job I learned that LGBTQ+ seniors were going back into the closet in long-term care facilities because nobody had told them they were welcome. I created best practices for care workers. I established an advisory group. I conducted the county’s first LGBTQ+ community survey. The community said they wanted a physical space to gather. The county listened. There is now a brick-and-mortar LGBTQ+ center in Montgomery County.

I have designed courses at Georgetown and George Mason that became core curriculum requirements. I have delivered keynotes for the U.S. Courts, the Federal Aviation Administration, Georgetown University’s Lavender Graduation, and Montgomery County Public Schools. Congressman Jamie Raskin recognized me as a Local Hero for this work.

I tell you all of this not to impress you but to show you the through-line: every job, every organization, every room I have entered has been an answer to the same question my grandfather planted in me at age five. My job is to make sure people have what they need.

I majored in Drama Therapy in college. I went in wanting to be an actress — I had visions of Hollywood and a couple of Emmys — and quickly discovered that the reality of that life involved waitressing and ten roommates. So I stayed in theater but shifted my focus to using it as a tool for healing.

I did not get my graduate degree in Drama Therapy. But that training has never left me. It is why I can walk into a room full of strangers and create enough safety within the first ten minutes that hard conversations become possible. It is why my workshops feel different from standard DEI training. It is why I can hold a room through grief and anger and resistance and still bring people to something actionable by the end.

I often describe myself as overeducated. A bachelor’s degree, a master’s degree, a doctorate. Each one was an answer to a question I was carrying. The Drama Therapy asked: how do you use story to heal? The Organizational Leadership asked: how do you change institutions? The Higher Education Leadership asked: how do you lead inside systems that weren’t built for you?

I have been speaking and training for most of my professional life, but I did not call myself a speaker until recently. It felt like a big claim. I was always more comfortable calling myself an educator, an advocate, a practitioner. But the truth is that I have been standing in rooms and on stages for over twenty years, moving people toward something — toward clarity, toward courage, toward action.

My signature framework is simple: Expose Truth. Cultivate Joy. Champion Visibility. It came from years of watching what actually moves institutions and the people inside them. Truth without joy burns people out. Joy without visibility leaves people unseen. Visibility without truth becomes performance. All three together — that is where change lives.

My talks don’t just inform. They move people — and then they equip them to move institutions.