women of color | The Fegins Report

Tag Archives: women of color

March 22, 2010 · 7:59 am

Celebrate Women in Leadership Series with Dawn McCoy

During the month of March 2010, Dawn McCoy, author of Leadership Building Blocks will highlight great women in leadership during Women’s History Month.

Linda: Thank you for allowing me to be a guest blogger today at Faygo’s Report. Today, in the Celebrate Women in Leadership series, I want to highlight Doris Pilkington Garimara.

The story of Doris Pilkington Garimara is amazing! Her legacy as a leader is extraordinary since she is the author of Rabbit-Proof Fence that became a noted film documenting the author’s mother, as well as two other mixed-race Aboriginal girls. The girl ran away from the Moore River Native Settlement, north of Perth, to return to their Aboriginal families after having been placed there in 1931. The book and film follows the girls as they trek/walk for nine weeks along 1,500 miles (2,400 km) of the Australian rabbit-proof fence to return to their community at Jigalong, while being tracked by a white authority figure and an Aboriginal tracker. What courage! What inner strength!

Austrailian author Doris Pilkington Garimara is an indigenous activist and lifetime advocate for reconciliation. Through her remarkable storytelling, Doris has raised awareness of Australian indigenous history, culture, and social conditions. She tells a story about the painfully true portrayal of the stolen generations, and the film opened up the discussion more generally about policies of protection.

Doris was born on Balfour Downs Station in the East Pilbara in 1937. As a toddler she was taken from her mother to be raised at the Moore River Mission. At 18, Doris left the mission system as the first of its members to qualify for the Royal Perth Hospital’s nursing aide training program. Following marriage and a family, she studied journalism and worked in film/video production. Her first book Caprice: A Stockman’s Daughter won the 1990 David Unaipon National Award.

Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence was first published in 1996, and was released internationally in 2002 as the film Rabbit-Proof Fence. The novel has now been translated into 11 languages worldwide. In 2002, Doris was appointed co-patron of the state and federal Sorry Day committees’ Journey of Healing. Her third novel Under the Wintamarra tree was also published in the same year.

In 2006, Doris published Home to Mother, a children’s version of her own mother’s courageous 1600 km journey on foot from the Moore River Native Settlement to Jigalong. In the same year, she was awarded an Order of Australia for service to the arts in Indigenous literature.

Doris Pilkington Garimara is the recipient of the 2008 Australia Council Red Ochre Award. The award pays tribute to an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander artist for their outstanding, life-long contribution to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander arts at home and abroad.

TOUR GIVEAWAY: Blog visitors who leave comments OR radio callers with questions for Dawn are eligible to win an autographed copy of Leadership Building Block and a copy of the Effective Community Engagement CD.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dawn McCoy is author of Leadership Building Blocks: An Insider’s Guide to Success. As one of the youngest elected African-American elected to the Sacramento City Unified School Board, McCoy shares seven leadership fundamentals in her book. Inspiring readers to be top in their field, Dawn shares her insights based upon twenty years serving as a nonprofit and government executive.

A motivational speaker, coach, and founder of Flourish Leadership Group, a leadership development and communications firm, Dawn is dedicated to transforming ordinary people into extraordinary leaders. In recent years, she has worked with organizations to develop their vision and create phenomenal results. Dawn has worked with hundreds of individuals to help them capture their spirit of leadership and truly become the effective leaders they were meant to be.

Visit Dawn online at FlourishLeadership.com.

Read an excerpt online and visit the tour schedule at http://bit.ly/LeadershipBuildingBlocks.

“Murder on the Down Low” Blog Tour Review

Meet Pamela Samuels Young,
author of Murder on the Down Low

Pamela Samuels Young is a practicing attorney and author of the legal thrillers, Murder on the Down Low, In Firm Pursuit, Every Reasonable Doubt, and the forthcoming, Buying Time. A desire to see women and people of color represented in today’s legal fiction prompted Pamela to start writing despite a busy career as an attorney. The former journalist and Compton native is a graduate of USC, Northwestern University and UC Berkeley’s Boalt Hall School of Law. Pamela is the fiction writing expert for BizyMoms.com and is on the Board of Directors of the Southern California Chapter of Mystery Writers of America.

ABOUT THE BOOK -Book review by Linda Fegins

Educated and prominent African –American males in Los Angeles are being murdered. The suspense filled book keeps you on the edge to figure out who did it. This legal thriller is a well-written page turner that realistically portrays the legal system. Significantly, this mystery educates the reader concerning the diverse viewpoints about a provocative social issue causing havoc in the black community, through the lives of its female characters’ struggles and mistakes. There is Vernetta Henderson, a savvy attorney at a big law firm trying to make partner. The others are Vernetta’s best friend “Special”, J.C., a detective for the Los Angeles Police Department, and Nichelle , a former prosecutor now a partner at her own law firm.

You find a story of a “sisterly bond” among these women in this tale of lies, lust, deceit, betrayal, and vengeance. The friends suffer a lost link in their circle of friendship when Maya died because of the deceit of her fiancé Eugene, an attorney. A wrongful death lawsuit is filed against Eugene. However, the hot-headed Special is not satisfied with simply suing Eugene for the death of her beloved cousin. Her hatred and desire for vengeance leads her to become involved in some underhanded activities. Is there a connection between this contentious lawsuit and the five murders ?

As a practicing attorney I was delighted to see women attorneys of color realistically represented in this legal fiction. Pamela has this to say about one of the main characters.

Character Sketch: Vernetta Henderson

Since you have written three novels about her, can you tell us a bit about Vernetta Henderson?

Vernetta is a savvy, 30-something LA attorney who is very career driven. I created her as the protagonist for my first three novels because I never saw African-American women depicted as attorneys in legal thrillers. I wanted to create a character who was dealing with some of the dilemmas that I faced as a young attorney in a high-profile law firm.

Although Every Reasonable Doubt was my first published novel, In Firm Pursuit was actually the first book that I wrote. It’s based on a wrongful termination case that I tried in federal court. I changed a lot of the facts because the real-life case wasn’t quite as exciting as the fictional one.

I have to admit that I’m a lot like Vernetta. Early in my legal career, making partner at a big firm was my primary goal. I worked long hours and didn’t have much of a personal life. But in my mid-thirties, I began to realize the importance of smelling the roses along the way. Money and professional achievements are great, but you’ll be missing out on quite a bit in life if that’s your sole definition of success. I don’t make anywhere near the kind of money I would make if I was still practicing law at a large law firm. But I have a lot more time to spend with the people I care about and to do the things I love, like writing legal thrillers.

Murder on the Blog Tour Giveaway

Please leave a comment to be eligible to win an autographed book and a 25 dollar gift card from Pamela Samuels Young. One winner will be chosen each day for a total of FIVE winners.

Follow the rest of Murder on the Down LowBlog Tour at http://bit.ly/MurderOnTheDownLow

For more information about Pamela, visit her at PamelaSamuelsYoung.com.

http://www.amazon.com/Murder-Down-Pamela-Samuels-Young/dp/0981562701/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1249528232&sr=8-2