As a prize-winning veteran reporter and columnist, I have covered hard news and soft: Presidential hopefuls, statehouse lawmakers, city hall protesters, hometown heroes, time-honored and pop celebrities. My articles have explored welfare reform; government takeovers of floundering schools in Appalachia; rent-controlled apartment living in Boston; the rush to sentence ultra-violent juveniles to death row; one Hollywood acting star’s Africa-focused film production company; the surge in African-American churches’ on-the-ground philanthropy in Africa; New Feminism’s youngest feminists; and others in an extensive menu of personalities and topics.

Presently, I freelance regularly for publications including Essence magazine, where I’m listed on the masthead as a contributing writer. Prior to freelancing full-time, I spent 16 years on the reporting staff of Newsday in New York, where my last position was as a senior writer whose duties included a weekly features column on assorted aspects of society, culture and lifestyle, from a post-Hurricane Katrina meditation on home and place to musings about the convergence of religious certainty and spiritual doubt. My work also has been published by Ms., The Crisis, Vibe, The Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Houston Chronicle, New Orleans Times-Picayune, Odyssey Couleur, Today’s Child, Ebony, Ebony.com, NiaOnline.com, SHRM.org and other news organizations.

The view from thousands of feet above ground is fields, streams, rock quarries and one prodigious, whirling river. The sky is dusty blue, the early evening sun high and conquering. Each section of earth below is distinct in color and geometry. Squares, pentagons and isosceles triangles, snaking lines and bone-straight trajectories across the city's edge … [My] forehead is smashed against the windowpane of seat 16A as the plane descends. My eyes are on land below that I claim as my own... For more of this Newsday essay, click here

As much as any sensible gay man alive back then, Jimmy Mack knew AIDS was consuming his kind, rolling over them like fire across dry brush. So, the day in 1987 that his doomsaying doctor told Mack he was HIV-positive, the physician didn't mince words: Mack likely would be dead inside of a couple of years ... In his despair, he chose his own palliatives: smoking crack, sniffing coke, puffing weed, shooting heroin, popping ecstasy and chasing it all with enough liquor to induce a nightly blackout that he called sleep... For more of this Newsday article, click here

… She’s on a conference call with the Win Without War steering committee, deciding precisely how they will respond when the 2,000th member of the U.S. military perishes in Iraq. “I think we’re up to 1,963,” says [Susan] Shaer, putting the phone on mute to make an aside. “Oh, my God! This probably is going to happen next week.”  She wades in once more: “We’re also going to honor all the Iraqi deaths. Do we have a reliable number on that?“... For more of this Ms. article, click here

... For a painful string of years Bernice King endured the recurring nightmare, which she ultimately reasoned was the marker of her accumulated grief. She had been a famously, suddenly fatherless child, forever surrounded by people staking their claim to her slain, hugely public parent. "My attitude was, 'Why does everybody have to come to the crypt with us?'" says King. "'Why do we have to share him? He is my dad.'"... For more of this Essence article, click here

…“I encourage courage because it is the most important of all the virtues,” says the acclaimed Maya Angelou.”Without courage, you can do nothing consistently. Courage is what helps you accomplish everything.”... For more of this Essence article, click here

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