SONGS IN THE KEY OF LIFE » Sisters Doing It For Themselves

National Poetry Month: Ursula Rucker

vivrant thang — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 03:18:53 +0000

by vivrant thang on national poetry month

As National Poetry Month comes to a close, I wanted to celebrate one of my favorite poets, Philly native Ursula Rucker. I was up in Philly a couple of weeks ago and just happened upon the Germantown Poetry Festival. I read about it before I got to town but didn’t think I would be able to make it over there during my short visit. While we were riding aimlessly down the never-ending Germantown Avenue, we ran right into Vernon Park. I thought I would have missed her, but I was right on time.

I don’t remember when I was first discovered Ursula and there’s still so many of her pieces that I’m unfamiliar with. She’s often compared to Nikki Giovanni and Sonya Sanchez, which is probably why I took notice. Not to mention the fact that she’s a cusser just like moi.

She first performed publicly at the Philly institution, Zanzibar Blue (RIP). She’s appeared on three Roots albums, Do You Want More?!?!, Illadelph Halflife, and the classic, Things Fall Apart. She’s also worked with one of my favorite UK soul artists, 4Hero. I love the blending of poetry with hip-hop and soul music. It’s just natural. Can it get any better?

Since I’m more of a prose-loving chick, a poet gots to bring the fire to hold my attention. From the time Ursula opens her mouth, everything about her delivery grabs your attention. She’s talking about real shit, which is the kind of poetry I feel. I wholeheartedly respect literary poets. I just think I od’d in grad school. Wasn’t until I moved to the DC area and started checking out open mikes that I really got into spoken word and gained a deeper appreciation for the art form.

If you’ve never heard Ursula spit, please check out these videos. The raw emotion this woman brings to her pieces is captivating. If you like what you hear, be sure to check out any of her three albums, Supa Sista, Silver or Lead, and Ma’ at Mama.

I have videos from the poetry festival, but some technical difficulties prevent me from posting them. Difficulties that caused me to burst into tears. Sometimes I hate being a woman. Seriously. I considered scrapping this post but I still wanted to celebrate these ill poetic lyricists before the month ended. I will find occasion to post them soon.

What A Woman Must Do, Def Poetry Jam Season 5

Love/Lift Ev’ry Voice And Sing f/ Orrin Evans Trio and Jaguar Wright (for Dr. Martin Luther King)

In addition to Maya Angelou, Nikki, Sonya, and Ntozake Shange, here are some other black female poets I love. Share yours in the comments.

Jahipster [official site | myspace]
Love the Poet [official site | myspace]
Tara Betts [offical site | myspace]
Olu Butterfly [myspace] – performs with Fertile Ground
Lady Wisdom [myspace]
Naima J [myspace]
Punany Poets (Jessica Holter) [official site | myspace]

Sisters Are Doing It For Themselves : [Soror] Dr. Calandra Tate, Ph.D.

vivrant thang — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 21:19:43 +0000

by vivrant thang on sisters doing it for themselves and young gifted & black

The “inferior sex” got a new exterior
We got doctors, lawyers, politicians too.
Everybody – take a look around.
Can you see – can you see – can you see
There’s a woman right next to you!
Sisters are doing it for themselves!

I bet you were worried I was going to do the whole post in pink and green huh? Don’t trip. You know it’s lovely.

On this date 100 years ago, my beloved sorority was founded on the campus of Howard University by a group of extraordinary women, many of them educators. So it is only fitting that I highlight one of my sorority sisters who is following in the footsteps of our beloved founders.

I was so proud to visit one of the blogs I highly respect, What About Our Daughters, and see Calandra featured as part of the “You Oughta Know” series, which focuses on inspirational and positive portrayals of black women who are doing it for themselves. It just so happens that Calandra is my former chapter soror and we were in grad school at University of Maryland during the same time. I finished my MA in English in 2001 and she was on the Ph.D. track. We also lived in the same apartment complex for a while. When I met her and learned that she was working towards her doctorate in math, I was beyond impressed.

See, I am so right-brained, I can’t fathom getting a doctorate in any left-brained oriented field. It blows my mind. However, to see a woman…a black woman… not only getting an advanced degree in that field, but also having a passion for it and wanting to share that with others really garnered my admiration. I can’t remember having any black male or female math or science teachers in school. I’m just glad to know that if my child should develop an affinity for math or science (must gonna come from her daddy’s side of the family), she’ll have another black woman to look up to. That pool is very small.

From What About Our Daughters:

Dr. Calandra Tate, Ph.D. graduated from Xavier University and went on to earn her doctorate in applied mathematics from the University of Maryland in College Park this month (December 2007 – the same month she turned 30). With her achievement Dr. Tate joins a distinguished and small group of Black women. According to The National Science Foundation 4,300 doctorates in mathematics and statistics were awarded in the 8 years between 1998-2005, only 48 were earned by African-American women.

She teaches statistics and probability at the U.S. Military Academy (West Point) through a special assignment with her employer, the U.S. Army Research Laboratory in Aldelphi, Md. It is at the research lab where she thought of her dissertation topic – “An Investigation of the Relationship Between Automated Machine Translation Evaluation Metrics and User Performance on an Information Extraction Task”. (wow!)

Tate started her freshman year at Xavier University pre-med but before the year’s end switched to mathematics. At the same time she was wooed by the language department to become a French major. She studied French since grade school and was an exchange student in France between her junior and senior years of high school.While at Xavier, Tate was active in student government and Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority Inc. Her senior year, she received two coveted Xavier awards: the Martin Luther King Jr. Peace Award for community service and the Mother Agatha Ryan Award for exemplifying the spirit and standards of the school through “reverence, personal integrity, loyalty, service and scholarship.”

Read more about Dr. Tate. I’m so thrilled to be able to call her “Dr.” and even prouder to call her my Soror. As I asked on my last related post, what are you doing with your life?

Happy Centennial Founders Day to each and every beautiful member of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc. I am truly proud to be a part of this sisterhood.

I’d also like to say rest in peace to Soror Donda West. Even though there were times you may have felt unpretty, you will always be beautiful to your Sorors.

Young, Gifted, and Black!

vivrant thang — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 18:56:11 +0000

To be young, gifted and black
We must begin to tell our young
Don’t you know there’s a whole world waiting for you?
Don’t you know the quest has just begun for you?

On my “Who’s That Girl?” page, I list a few of my negative traits. I know it’s hard to believe, but yes, your girl Vivrant Thang has a flaw or five. The one that probably haunts me the most is my tendency to procrastinate and my lack of discipline with certain things. These are probably two things that have kept me from true greatness. Not saying that I’m doing half bad, but there’s so much more I know I could do if I would just become more disciplined and stop wasting time!

I have few regrets in life but one is that I wish I would have defined my career path in my early to mid-twenties. I let myself fall into IT after obtaining my Masters in English (don’t ask). Although this field has opened up doors to a great side hustle and I’m finding a way to blend my experience in the field with my passion for literature, I still have the occasional shoulda, woulda, coulda thoughts.

I admire young women who discover their mission early in life like my good friend Ro, a seasoned nonprofit executive at 24! It inspires me. So I was excited to see that Business Week’s top entrepreneurs age 25 and under had some women of color up in the mix. Sisters that are already doing it for themselves! Check them out! All bio information taken from the Business Week site. They are holding a contest in which readers can vote on which business has the most promise. Make sure you cast your vote for one of these promising business women.

Ashley Reed, 21, ASR Clothing (Detroit)

Reed started her business after classmates in high school commented on her custom-designed clothes and asked her to design pieces for them. She says that fashion design has always been her passion. Reed says she doesn’t spend too much time worrying about her age, as she’s busy running her business and majoring in retailing at Michigan State during the regular academic year and majoring in fashion merchandising and management at the Fashion Institute of Technology in the summer. Reed expects to complete both degrees in 2008.

Her five-employee business has been featured in newspapers and magazines, and most of its clients are high school or college students from the U.S. but she says recently it has received international orders. For now, she’s investing in equipment that allows her to speed up production and is planning to expand when she graduates.

Ubong Attah, 23, Studio10Fourteen and Prolete Medical Billing (Dallas)

Ubong Attah describes herself as a serial entrepreneur. She ran a tutoring business in high school, taught herself Web design in college, then started a Web design firm her senior year called Studio10Fourteen, which she says is profitable and continues to operate. Ubong recently sold another business, an online jewelry shop, for around $55,000.

Because she was recently diagnosed with systemic lupus, she has turned her attention to starting a home-based business. Her new company, Prolete Medical Billing, makes use of her health-information management degree from Saint Louis University in St. Louis and her experience doing administrative work for her mother’s two home health agencies. Ubong expects Prolete to have revenues of around $4 million in 2008.

Deborah Umunnabuike, 23; Jessica Umunnabuike, 21, Avant Gaudy, Chicago

“I’m looking to learn how to create a more socially responsible business,” says Deborah Umunnabuike, a political science major at the University of Chicago and co-founder of Avant Gaudy, an online vintage clothing shop she started with her sister, Jessica, an undergraduate at Hofstra University, in the summer of 2005. The daughters of Nigerian immigrants started the three-employee business because they were passionate about clothes and saw a growing demand among their peers for vintage clothing. And they soon realized that there was a growing demand abroad as well, specifically in parts of Europe, Southeast Asia, and Australia, based on analyzing Web traffic to their site, almost 26,000 visitors from more than 30 countries. The sisters recruited Hong Kong native Vincent Choi to bring a global perspective to the business and better reach shoppers in Asia.

Deborah says running the business has made her want to become a serial entrepreneur, but until she graduates in 2009, she will continue to run it conservatively. She is also involved with the Forte Foundation, a group dedicated to creating young women business leaders, and is interested in continuing community work in the spirit of Avant Gaudy’s DIY/Smashup Chicago, a daylong networking and trade-show event she organized in 2006 for craftspeople and entrepreneurs.

Jasmine Lawrence, 16, Eden Body Works, Williamstown, N.J.

When she was just 11, Jasmine was on her way to becoming an entrepreneur. After a chemical hair relaxer caused almost all of her hair to fall out, Jasmine decided to make her own. She researched natural hair-care products online but wasn’t satisfied. She found that most of them weren’t all-natural products, so she put her allowance together and made her own, using ingredients such as lavender oil. “I thought I must not be the only one out there with this kind of problem,” she explains. “I wanted to share my invention with the world.”

Lawrence participated in programs sponsored by the National Foundation for Teaching Entrepreneurship, which she says helped her to start “a real business” and gave her pro bono legal and financial help she used to launch Eden Body Works. In short order, she got a business license, a tax ID number, insurance, women’s and minority business certificates, and a trademark on her company’s name. After borrowing $2,000 from her parents, the high school junior launched her company (working before school and after finishing her homework). This year she expects to earn $100,000 in sales. (she’s 16 ya’ll).

Her products can be found in Walmart and Whole Foods and she’s been featured on Oprah and the Montel Williams show.

Again, she’s 16.

What are you doing with your life?

Update: Has this post left you feeling inspired? A reader left this in the comments. Good stuff!

If you or any women you know want to start their own business, there is a great contest going on called “Make Your Dreams Come True With Mirassou”. They will be awarding one aspiring business woman $50,000 plus a team of professional consultants to help kick start her business! Visit the site for more info. The deadline to enter is December 15, 2007