Greetings to my readers and Happy Belated New Year! My hiatus has a simple explanation: I was finishing all of my final work in order to graduate with my MFA on January 12. It’s been a challenging yet rewarding past two years in the Warren Wilson program, but I am grateful and have no regrets.

In a world where black people still face so much discrimination, where there is senseless shooting and violence against them, I would like to honor Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. by paying tribute to the black mentors I have had at almost every stage of my education. And even where black people are not facing violence, there is still subtle racism. I’m proud to say that I have had black mentors who dispel bad stereotypes and images.

In my undergraduate years, my departmental advisor in anthropology was Professor James Gibbs. I remember profoundly one of the most important pieces of advice he gave me was, “You must learn to develop a tolerance for ambiguity.” As an impatient 20 year old, it was a hard lesson to learn! His wife, Professor Jewelle Taylor Gibbs, herself an accomplished academic at Berkeley, was a guest lecturer in one of my classes. During my master’s degree program in higher education, I did not happen to have any black professors or advisors. However, what was significant and inspiring was the number of black students in my program who were in academia and doing graduate work in the field. During formal studies of music in musicology, I was very fortunate to have an advocate in a difficult time, Professor Naomi André, who had not only an impeccable pedigree and abilities, but also a tremendously classy and warm personality. I have been fortunate to study opera singing with Professor George Shirley, a legendary tenor, with whom I feel have only scratched the surface of all he knows as an artist. Rightly so, he was awarded the National Medal of the Arts in 2014 by President Obama.

More recently, in the Warren Wilson program, I had the young and brilliant Danielle Evans for an advisor my first semester, who is a first-rate intellectual and fellow Columbia lion! I was also fortunate to have a book discussion seminar just recently with T. Geronimo Johnson, who awed us all with his ability to be both didactic as well as inclusive with students’ feedback. I sincerely hope he writes a craft book for fiction writers. Also important to my writing training is auto-didact and encyclopedic-knowledged writer Keith Hood, a pillar of our local writing community.

I count myself fortunate in that I have had these great role models who are first and foremost artists and academics and teachers, beyond the label of “black.” I am fortunate that I have had so many great black role models, and only wish others could as well. That might help with alleviating some of the racism that still sadly pervades our society. Here is my gratitude to these women and men of letters, who just happen to be black.