Category: General Topics

Stella Spring Giveaway: Enter to Win

If you’re in a hurry, take the short cut to this announcement. CLICK HERE. ​

The sun is out, the trees are budding, and the flowers are in full bloom. That’s right, spring is here and I am excited to announce my first Spring Giveaway.

Let’s be real, who doesn’t like FREE stuff??

Because of this, I am reaching out to you in regard to my upcoming Stella Spring Giveaway.

Giveaway
Stella Spring Giveaway April 12-26th

The Stella Spring Giveaway includes paperback signed copies of all 3 books in The Stella Trilogy PLUS matching Bookmarks. The Stella Trilogy is a 3 Part Standalone Series about one woman and her family’s struggle for identity and freedom. By standalone, we mean it was written to be read in any order as a standalone novella. Short, sweet, and to the point, start at Book Three and work your way down to Book One. Or, read in chronological order, you decide! Already have this series? Win it for someone else! Have teens? This Historical, Young Adult Series is perfect for getting their summer reading list off to a great start. You will be able to  enter the contest HERE when it launches (only your email address is required).

The contest begins Tuesday, April 12, 2016 and ends Tuesday, April 26, 2016 so there’s plenty of time to spread the word and enter: Spread the Word.

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Kathryn Reed on Between Slavery and Freedom (Stella, Book 1)

“Yecheilyah Ysrayl takes us on a colorful and thought provoking journey through the eyes of a mulatto slave woman Stella. Generations later, Stella’s descendant Cynthia May has no idea of Stella’s life as a slave, nor the true identity of their bloodline. Since Cynthia is a racist she is in for a rude awakening. Stella is reminiscent of a wonderfully written slave narrative, a story of history and pain, it is a brilliant opener of the Stella series.”

Colleen Chesebro on Beyond The Colored Line (Stella, Book 2)

“By the time the Great Depression eases, Stella and her family move to segregated Chicago, where life is not much better. Aunt Sara, a school teacher, struggles to wait for the school district to pay her. Sara has made the step into white society by dating an affluent doctor and encourages Stella to do the same. After a discussion with Aunt Sara, Stella decides to pass for white. Sidney McNair is born and enters a white society where she had the freedom to go where she chooses and to buy whatever she likes. Stella has crossed the colored line.”

Christa Wojo. on The Road to Freedom (Stella, Book 3)

“Like the first book, Ysrayl works her magic of putting the reader into her characters’ minds to witness history through their emotions and perspectives. At one point in the story, the friends are trapped in their vehicle as it’s mobbed by a pack of violent racists. My heart was literally pounding at this point. I was horrified that anyone had to experience such ugly cruelty.”

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Like. Share. Enter. Win.

Music and Words Blog Award

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Although The PBS Blog is now Blog Free, I would like to take the time to thank Elissa of Embracing My Inner Ginger for nominating us for the Music and Words Blog Award. I love music and I believe it’s such an important part of history, of future and of present day. There is such a healing quality to music that can be as light as touching the surface of human emotion or run as deep as impacting and changing lives. The musical therapy of words can take us as far back as childhood and for this I always find solace in finding that one song that can take me back to a memorable place. Music to me is a lot like moving pictures. Photos capture the excitement or action of the moment and whenever we look at them we are taken back to that place. We remember when we were learning something new, doing something adventurous or feeling slightly down. The pictures take us back there. Back to that exact second. The moment our eyes twinkled for the first time and just before it darkened again to be revisited at a later time. Like the time between when the baby took his first step and before he fell. Camera’s capture that tiny space of opportunity and music, to me, is much the same way. Except music is moving and flowing, and riding the beat like waves into another time and place.

Of course, since I am blog free I will not be participating in any of the rules but I have added the Award to my PBS Blog Award shelf as I do all of my awards to show my appreciation.

Don’t forget to stop by Thursday for our weekly Throwback Thursday Jams :).

Our Deepest Fear

…is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be?

Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightening about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.

-Marianne Williamson, A Return to Love

This is just an excerpt of the entire quote and its so deep to me. It’s not our failures or inabilities that stop us from going that extra mile. For many of us, its what we can do, our strengths, our gifts, and that light deep down inside of us that frighten us most.

SUNDAY’S THOUGHT OF THE DAY WITH POSIWORLD

Gentleness. Humility. Compassion. Freedom.

posiworld's avatarPOSIWORLD'S BLOG

“We need women who are so strong that they can be gentle, so educated that they can be humble, so fierce that they can be compassionate, so passionate that they can be rational, and so disciplined that they can be free,” 

-Kavita N. Ramdas

Posiworld’s thoughts: We need men like this too

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Separation From Blogging

The sun had not completely set on my first night away before I was flooded with post and story ideas. And by the time the sky was overspread with blackness and poured into my bedroom, I’d written two poems already. To what do I owe this sudden flood of inspiration? I suppose it’s because a relaxed mind is a creative mind, or so they say. But in my reflection, I’ve had a lot of time to think and have come to the conclusion that there is some truth to that saying; separation from the online scene does tend to resurrect a kind of motivation lost during the constant interaction online. Personally, the desire to force a thought on top white paper seems to ring too loudly when I want to write, or rather feel I have to as opposed to when I’m just living life. The anxious stroke of the pen, or the thrashing keyboard always comes in that moment when you’re consciously aware that you must scribble something into existence. You thus search desperately for something to spark a flame, something to satisfy this urge but pushing always pulls away. The more you push a thought, try as you must to force a post, the more ideas slip from your fingers like liquid desperation.

It is at this point that the mind needs to be set aside for a while. To separate, to relax, and to calm from the influx of emails, WordPress Readers, and advice on how we should transfer our thoughts on to the page or rather, the screen. This tends to, for me, bring to life a sudden rush of creativity. Where thoughts have been left to grow and to mature before hitting the spotlight. To give my thoughts a chance to breathe and to exist, all neatly wrapped and stored into this place inaccessible among the crowd but dancing in a place called solitude. Even this post for instance,  came easy, smooth and without effort. There was no question or debate or concern about what it would be like. It just existed and I let it be. Just a coming forth of thoughts I’d written down while sitting on my bed and yet not at all there. Somewhere uninterrupted by the perspective of others, whose words do tend to spark great creativity, but whose birth is not as beautiful as the new born torn from my own flesh. Words that come untainted and unscathed by opinion. Nothing but pure inspiration come from my own head, smack down in the midst of the quite.

Black Slaves, Native Masters

“I got Indian in my family.”

Is something I hear often among the black community. Even in my own family, my mom talks of how her dad was 100% Cherokee Indian and how our family were cow slaughters which explains my maiden last name which is Hereford, a kind of cow.

Black Slaves, Native Masters

However, while many black families are proud to proclaim their Native Heritage, what is rarely passed around our dinner tables is an important fact in American History. This fact being that even the 5 Civilized Indian Tribes held slaves. A lot of black people jump at the chance to proclaim the above statement because oppressed people typically wants to identify with other oppressed people but the truth is stranger than fiction. Native Americans were oppressed by Europeans but they both had black slaves. In fact, Native Americans knew the layout of the land better than anyone else and it was they who taught the Europeans how to track and to capture slaves. (This is why in last weeks Underground Episode the little boy asked the black slave, “You used to live with the Indians didn’t you? And you taught my daddy how to track.” He used to live with the Indians because he was their slave same as he is the slave to the little boys father. Underground is a very well written TV show).

“Though the harsh treatment of enslaved Africans largely paled in comparison to that of white slaveholders, Blacks still were treated as an underclass among Native Americas. The Five Civilized Tribes even established slave codes that protected owners’ property rights and restricted the rights of Blacks.”

(Barbara-Shae Jackson, The Atlanta Black Star)

What’s deep about my family history is this:

Cherokee is one of the tribes who took part in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade (along with Chickasaw and others). In addition, the term “Cow-Boy” is also derivative of slavery. The slave boys who handled the cows were called cow boys. So when you watch Quentin Tarantino’s Django the content is actually not out of context far as the cow boy theme is concerned and my maiden name is potentially much more deep than we know.

Patience

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“Stillness is not a sign of weakness or defeat. It is showing reverence for what is to come. Humility is the beginning of the manifestation of goals and aspirations. How can we see things clearly if we are always on the go? There is movement in stillness. Moving slowly does not mean we are behind in the race. It just means we are learning our race better to win it.” – Tara Townes