By Anna M.A. Stracey Naomi, my daughter, started walking when she was 10 months old. She began dancing at 18 months. She loved to twirl to the Nutcracker, loved to watch ballerinas on television. Naomi went to ballet class for the first time when she was...
By Alexia McKay It’s 2021, and representation still matters—perhaps more than ever. I don’t consider myself to be the poster image for all young, Black women. However, as a Black journalist—and now publisher—I do consider my position as a small corner of a larger picture that...
By Elliott Potter April is National Child Abuse Prevention Month. This is part of a series featuring services offered for child-abuse survivors at the Child Advocacy Center of Onslow County in Jacksonville, N.C. When it comes to helping children through the investigations of physical, sexual and...
By Elliott Potter April is National Child Abuse Prevention Month. This is part of a series featuring services offered for child-abuse survivors at the Child Advocacy Center of Onslow County in Jacksonville, N.C. In Onslow County in southeastern North Carolina, the Child Advocacy Center is the hub...
By Patricia Daly When I retired in 2011, I wanted to fulfill a long-suppressed desire to nurture my spiritual development and love of writing that had been put on hold for decades. I joined a writing group of friends and began sharing spiritual stories with them. After...
By Tiffany Rucker, MBA Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime. --African and Chinese Proverb It all started with a conversation about summer. My then 14-year-old son, Jeremiah, sat me down and...
By Elliott Potter Dawn Rochelle grew up in Onslow County in southeastern North Carolina, in the impact zone of a prominent military presence. The county's demographics are shaped by Camp Lejeune Marine Corps Base, a sprawling installation where young service members train on land, in the...
Julia Delmerico is a shining example of community involvement (we’ve shared some of Julia’s impact with you before). So, of course, we were thrilled when she recently received some well-deserved recognition and was named “Big Sister of the Year” by Big Brothers Big Sisters of Tampa Bay (BBBS). We...
By Elliott Potter COVID-19 has claimed so many victims and caused so much damage that it almost seems uncaring to look beyond the troubling death toll and pointlessly frustrating to focus on just a single mucked-up aspect of daily life. We’re still coming to grips with the...
By Anna M.A. Stracey It is easy to be mesmerized by Marcy Paini’s magnetism, creativity and intelligence. She is truly an artist, channeling her life experiences into her amazing multimedia works. Over the years, her style has transformed from minimalist paintings on canvas to photography to...