We all woke to sad news this morning. 

Author, poet, and activist Maya Angelou has died. 

When I learned of this a felt a sadness akin to that of losing a relative or a friend. I never met Ms. Angelou but she touched my life in a way I struggle putting into words. 

She is one of the reasons I am a writer. 

I started reading her poetry at an early age and I found myself in her verse. 

She, along with poets like Nikki Giovanni, urged me to write poetry of my own and as terrible as my poetry may have been compared to theirs those exercises helped me find my voice. 

Ms. Angelou was brave enough to tell her story and thus gave me the courage to tell mine. And she showed me that writing could be a form of activism. She showed me that writing could change the world by touching one life at a time. 

And every time I read "Phenomenal Woman" I feel beautiful, powerful, and divine. 

Young Maya Angelou

In honor of Ms. Angelou's memory, USA Today compiled a list of 13 of her best quotes. Here's my favorite: 

 "My mission in life is not merely to survive, but to thrive; and to do so with some passion, some compassion, some humor, and some style."

This is the way I want to live too. And I thank Ms. Angelou for inspiring me not only to write but to live a life worth writing about. 

Yesterday my sweet home Alabama was hit with an unexpected snow storm around 10 a.m. This resulted in possibly hundreds of people stranded at work or on roadways as many highways and streets became impassable due to ice and abandoned cars. I was one of the lucky ones and managed to make it home in about three hours. (My commute is normally less than 15 minutes.) My younger brother, who was living a doctor's appointment when the snowfall started didn't make it home until about six hours later. 

Things got bad. Really bad. I think Birmingham columnist John Archibald described it best:  

Snowpocalypse. Car-mageddon. Our day of wreckoning. Children separated from their families, pregnant women trapped in SUVs, infants stranded without formula, traffic snarled beyond belief, icy cold misery from the Shoals to the shore.

In a state that always over-reacts, that sells out bread and milk days in advance of "a dusting" and calls off schools at the threat of wind chill, we were caught with our snow pants down.

Some Northerners may scoff at our panic over a few inches of accumulation and deem us as country bumpkins, but those people can suck it! (Oh, I'm sorry. That wasn't very Southern or ladylike of me, was it?) Just as people in some Northern states consider 85 degrees a heat wave because they don't have central air, the South is crippled by snow because we don't have the equipment or resources to handle it. And while I'm lucky enough to have had much experience driving in snow and ice due to my years living in the Midwest, most of my fellow Alabamians don't have such knowledge and thus have every right to freak out when white stuff starts falling from the sky. 

But in the midst of this mess Southerners stuck together. 

Image via The Daily South

Erin Shaw Street of Southern Living and Julie McKinney of Alabama Media Group both compiled examples of heartwarming southern hospitality. 

People were helping complete strangers push cars that were stuck. Businesses and churches opened their doors to stranded motorists who were hungry and cold. People even opened their homes to those who needed a place to sleep overnight. And teachers across the state stayed at school to take care of kids who couldn't make it home. 

Alabama School of Fine Arts kids spending the night at school

We Southerners even used the Internet as a way to help, tweeting out traffic information and details about shelters.  A Facebook page was created to help stranded motorists. 

So, no, we may not have the equipment to deal with snowfall and ice, but we have hearts of kindness that can weather any storm. 

image via

When I came out as a feminist I felt I had an entire city celebrating with me. 

I use the phrase "came out" in an attempt to reflect the gravity of a Christian gal from Birmingham, Alabama identifying as a feminist. Many of the churches I've attended in the Deep South consider feminists to be women whose hobbies include witchcraft, killing babies, and emasculating men. Thus, calling myself a feminist is pretty big deal. 

I kind of cheated. I came out as a feminist in a column I wrote for a paper not in Birmingham, but in Louisville -- a Kentucky city that isn't quite sure if it's Midwestern or Southern. The paper was also mostly read by residents in their 20s and 30s. When the column was published my email inbox was flooded with messages from other women who shared my beliefs. The owner of a local boutique cut out the article, taped it to one of the walls of her store and wrote above it: "We love Javacia." 

The purpose of the article was not only to announce that I was a feminist, but also to dispel the myth that feminism is about emasculating men. But looking back, I wish I could change the headline. It read: "Excuse me, sir, but feminism has nothing to do with you."

And now I know that simply isn't true. 

I was young when I wrote that -- only 25 or 26 years old -- and I had only identified as feminist for a couple of years. So I hadn't read much contemporary feminist writing and thus I hadn't realized how much men are hurt by sexism too.

Gender stereotypes tell men they shouldn't show emotions. Gender stereotypes tell dads they're dumb and that if they decide to stay home with their children they aren't real men. 

And recently a man in Florida was told that he couldn't take his wife's last name, essentially, because men don't do that. 

According to a Reuters news report, Lazaro Sopena opted to change his name after his 2011 marriage to Hanh Dinh to help keep her family's name alive. He obtained a new passport and Social Security card and changed his bank account and credit cards before applying to update his drivers license. Following the same steps required of a woman who take her husband's last name, Dinh presented his marriage certificate to his local DMV and paid a small fee to get a new driver's license. 

But then a year later Dinh received a letter from Florida's DMV last December accusing him of "obtaining a driving license by fraud," and informing him that his license would be suspended at the end of the month. 

Dinh is fighting the DMV on the decision but was told that to change his name legally he has to go to court first and go through a process that takes several months and has a $400 filing fee. 

When he explained he was changing his name due to marriage, he was told "that only works for women." 

Only nine states enable a man to change his name upon marriage: California, New York, Hawaii, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Oregon, Iowa, Georgia and North Dakota.

Apparently, it's OK for women to change their names after marriage because they're considered an extension of their husbands. 

Right. 

And the fact that there may be men (and women) reading about this story and thinking that it's absurd for a man to take his wife's name is just more proof that the feminist movement is still needed for both women and men alike.   

Photo Credit: Ron Mader via Flickr/Creative Commons

Yesterday morning when I logged onto my favorite social networking sites I was immediately faced with the sad news of the death of Armando Montano, a 22-year-old Associated Press intern. Montano, who was working this summer as a news intern for the AP bureau in Mexico City, Mexico, was found dead early Saturday. 


Montano’s body was found in the elevator shaft of an apartment building near where he was living. The circumstances of his death are being investigated by Mexican authorities.


Even though I didn't know Montano, news of his death hit me hard and not just because he was so young. In the summer of 2003, I too was an AP intern. Montano and I were also both part of the Chips Quinn Scholars program, which offers journalism students of color hands-on training in journalism and mentoring by caring news veterans.


In a Nov. 2007 column for the Denver Post, Montano, who was a Colorado Springs, Colorado resident, wrote about his desire to become a journalist despite the fact that most people would consider journalism a dying field. He wrote: 

Journalism is changing, newspaper circulation is falling, and people are even turning away from broadcast news. So why do I want to be a journalist in this day and age?

For the thrill of getting a hot story. So I can inform the public about wrongdoing. So I can be part of a system that represents and protects democracy.

Just because journalism is changing doesn't mean that we have to discard its best principles. From where I stand — a high school teenager looking for my life's direction — those principles are easy to find.

Chuck Dean, senior political reporter for The Birmingham News, shared his reflections on Montano's words yesterday on Twitter and said that though he's been a reporter for a generation he's "never read better words about why good reporters do what they do or better advice as our craft changes." I couldn't agree more. 

Regardless of your profession, there is a valuable lesson to be learned here from someone who was only beginning to live his life. No matter how circumstances shift and the landscape around you changes, hold on to principles. Ask yourself why you pursued this profession, this passion, in the first place and figure out a way to carry out that purpose no matter what. 

Thank you, Mando, for your wise words. 

Photo by Joe Corrigan
Courtesy TechCrunch via Flikr/Creative Commons

“My mother wanted us to understand that the tragedies of your life one day have to potential to be the comic stories the next.”  -- Nora Ephron

Author and screenwriter Nora Ephron died Tuesday at New York Presbyterian Hospital, where she was being treated for acute myeloid leukemia and pneumonia. 

While I am, of course, familiar with Ephron's movies such as Sleepless in Seattle, When Harry Met Sally and Julie & Julia, it wasn't until I started reading her obituaries that I realized how much more she had accomplished and the example she set for  women writers. 

As the Los Angeles Times notes, Ephron's "protagonists, who included the chef Julia Child and the whistle-blower Karen Silkwood, were often women and typically were just as capable — if not more so — than the men around them."

And as Mariam of Redbone Afropuff mentioned in a comment to a recent post on the blog, Ephron showed her that "yes, I can be a journalist, a novelist, a memoirist, and essayist, a screenwriter and a playwright all in one lifetime." 

Just to give a sampling of what she accomplished off screen, in the 1960s Ephron worked for the New York Post and then went on to write monthly columns in the 1970s for Esquire and New York magazines. Many of the pieces she wrote for these magazines were collected in three books of essays, Wallflower at the Orgy (1970), Crazy Salad: Some Things About Women (1975) and Scribble, Scribble: Notes on the Media (1979). 

Examples of more recent writings include her 2006 collection of essays, I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Reflections on Being a Woman and her 2010 collection of essays, I Remember Nothing, which takes a humorous look at the aging process and other topics.

Prolific is a word that just doesn't seem to fully describe her career, a career I'm sorry I didn't explore more when she was still with us. But her legacy remains to remind us to keep writing, writing, writing and to tell our stories no matter what. 

Happy Saturday, babes! I've decided to start posting some of my best content from my blog GeorgiaMae.com here at The Writeous Babe Project too. Check out this post on race and weight loss. 

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Image via Creative Commons

The Los Angeles Times reported Tuesday that a recent study published in the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine found that while exercise is a nearly sure way to prevent obesity in white adolescent girls, it does not have the same effect on African American girls.

From the L.A. Times:

The study, published in the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, found that among black adolescent girls who moved the most at age 12, obesity at age 14 was nearly as likely as it was for those whose activity rates were far lower.

For white girls, by contrast, regular exercise at 12 appeared a nearly sure way to head off obesity at 14. That finding held, even when the calorie intakes of an African American youngster and her white counterpart were the same.

The article goes on to say that the study falls in line with research that finds black women oxidize fat more slowly in response to exercise, and that their resting metabolic rates are lower than those of white women.

These findings come in the midst of a national effort to fight the obesity epidemic in the United States and many of those efforts focus on black women. Four in five African American women are overweight or obese when measured by the body mass index, or BMI. Even First Lady Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move” campaign has had a strong focus on encouraging black girls to be more active since experts say the run-up in weight may begin in adolescence.

So with this new research should black women and girls just give up? Should we hang up our sneakers and head to the couch? Of course not!

In fact, Linda Bacon, an associate nutritionist with UC Davis who was interviewed for the L.A. Times article, has been very critical of the focus on things like weight, BMI, and percent body fat. She believes that people should be encouraged to exercise and eat right for the sake of good health, not a number on a scale. 

The focus on weight can discourage people from being active and eating a healthy diet if they’re not shedding pounds and can lead thin people who eat junk food all the time to think that they’re healthy. Bacon does not believe weight alone determines a person’s level of health.

In the March issue of Glamour magazine she was quoted saying that overweight people can lead long, disease-free lives. “If you eat a good diet and exercise” Bacon told Glamour, “you’re likely to be healthy, no matter what the scale says.”

About a year ago I made the decision to get rid of my scale. I had successfully shed some pounds I wanted to lose but along the way I had become obsessed with my weight, so much so that my sense of self-worth had become too tied to my size. So last summer I trashed my scale and decided to focus on overall fitness. 

That’s when I started training for a half-marathon, something I never thought I would do because even though I had always enjoyed things like dance aerobics classes I had always told myself I could never be a runner. But in February of this year I crossed the finish line of the Mercedes Benz Half-Marathon in Birmingham, Alabama donning a Black Girls Run t-shirt and track jacket. 

This summer I’m working to improve my strength, while still doing plenty of running, dancing, and cycling to maintain good cardiovascular health.

And the only time you will see me stepping on a scale is at a doctor’s office.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I think that for some women weight loss is crucial. If you’ve been told by a doctor that you need to shed pounds because your weight is putting you at serious risk for life-threatening diseases, then by all means follow your doctor’s orders, but do so by making lifestyle changes, not with a crash diet. And don’t get discouraged from your efforts to exercise and eat right just because you can’t reach a magic number on a chart or wear a certain size dress or jeans.

So to all women, regardless of race, out there hitting the gym to lift weights, work that elliptical or dance at your favorite aerobics class, keep moving! To all women and girls pounding the pavement training for your first 5K, 10K, or half-marathon, keep running. With each step you are making your body healthier and stronger, even if it’s not getting smaller.