For anybody who has watched the ride, the pivot feels unexpected, yet somehow inevitable. The Memphis native built her name in R&B, stacking six albums and a reputation for singing heartbreak that leaves a mark. Tunes like “V.S.O.P.” and “The Rain” stayed in heavy rotation for a reason. Reality TV did the rest. A whole new crowd found her through Love & Hip Hop, people who could not have named a single song of hers if you paid them. Then came a Real Housewives of Atlanta run, where she said the blunt things most of us only think, sometimes crying about them on camera twenty minutes later.

Nobody could argue the credentials. Rebellious Soul topped the R&B charts in 2013 and eventually earned gold certification in 2024. Five more R&B albums followed, giving her a career solid enough to silence anybody who thought reality television was all she had to offer. This was hardly a famous face dabbling in a hobby. A trained vocalist with range to burn, she was now stepping into the one musical home the industry had spent years insisting was off limits.

Here is the part most folks missed. Twang came first. K. Michelle’s childhood soundtrack ran on the Judds, Dolly Parton, and Lee Ann Womack. Her yodeling, yes ma’am, actual yodeling, even earned the teenager a music scholarship to Florida A&M. That girl could ride a cowboy ballad before she ever cut a note of soul. Somewhere along the way the business slammed that porch door shut. Those Tennessee roots apparently did not count for much. As K. Michelle tells it, industry folks made it painfully clear that country music was no place for a Black woman.

Read that twice, because Black women already know what “reasons” tends to mean.

The record itself is proof of what stubbornness and talent can do once they finally shake hands. Produced by Kristian Bush of Sugarland, the nine songs move through faith, liquor, grief, and grown folks’ honesty without flinching. The title track is a prayer for anybody who sips a little when the hurt gets loud and still believes God is listening. “Jack Daniel’s” struts. “Yodel” shows off those scholarship pipes and dares you not to grin. “Blame Tennessee” sounds like a daughter making peace with home.

None of it begs permission, and that is the whole point.

So what is she up to now? Living in the afterglow and the grind of a launch, both at once. To christen the project, she threw a release weekend and took the new songs straight to the stage. The Fillmore in New Orleans hosted her the night the album dropped, followed by shows in Dallas and Houston. Orlando gets a turn at the House of Blues on November 29. These days K. Michelle keeps one boot in Atlanta and the other in Music City, which tells you plenty about where her heart is pointed. A woman grown enough to know better is starting over anyway, on purpose, with her whole chest.

This reaches past one singer’s track list, and here is why. Sistas get handed a script early. Be twice as good, stay in your lane, pick the ambition that keeps everybody else comfortable, and for heaven’s sake settle down before thirty. Nashville has a long history of acting as if we were never there. Country music owes plenty to Black musical traditions, including the banjo, developed by enslaved Africans and their descendants from older African instruments. Yet the welcome mat has too often vanished when a sister showed up. In she walked regardless. K. Michelle is part of a growing crew of Black artists making the place sit with all of that whether it likes it or not.

Nashville was not about to mail her an invitation. K. Michelle knew it and stopped asking. Instead, the singer teamed up with Kristian Bush of Sugarland to make the country album she had always wanted. The music sounded every bit as country as it pleased, no apology attached. Any grown woman can steal that move whenever the time feels right.

Black women reading this on a work break already know where it is headed. Think about the thing you quit on. Maybe it was a degree. Could be a little side business you sketched out and buried in a drawer. Might even be the plain sound of your own voice. A calling does not die. It goes quiet and it waits. Truth is, nobody rolled out a red carpet for this move either. Country radio did not grow a heart overnight. Tired of asking twice, she pushed in, and twenty years of being told to hush gave her plenty to sing about.

It is the age that stops me cold. At twenty five, the years ahead can make a gamble feel less frightening. Spend fifteen years building financial security, earning respect, and bringing home a steady paycheck. Now try putting your name on the line for a sound the radio never wanted from you. Your hands do not stay still. Hers did not either. The chips went in anyway. Every track on here is a dare pointed at everybody who already decided their best years clocked out ages ago.

Most of us do the opposite. We take the thing we love and shove it under everything we are supposed to be handling. Then we whisper that the window shut ages back. Passion, we tell ourselves, is a luxury for the young. Starting fresh at this point would only embarrass the kids.

So here is your permission slip, Sistas, not that you needed one from me. That dream you filed away is not dead. It has been sitting in a drawer getting restless. Black women have always made a way out of no way, kicking down doors that somebody bolted shut in our faces. Your turn did not expire. It has just been waiting on you to show up. Go pour yourself a whiskey, or a sweet tea if that is more your style, whisper a little prayer, and go claim the thing they swore would never be yours.

Staff Writer; Raven Jones

Raven writes about music, relationships, and the everyday ups and downs of Black women… She keeps it honest, encourages other sistas, and can be reached at RavenJ@ThySistas.com.

The woman who actually broke through did the opposite of all that.

Those early car videos were nothing fancy. Vegan sandwich in hand, sitting in the front seat, she talked to the camera the way you’d talk to a cousin you actually like. That easy warmth reached millions. No polish or borrowed personality, just a woman being all the way herself, and the internet could not get enough.

Here is what tends to fall out of the feel good version of that rise. For a long stretch the opposite was true. Brown bent her speech, watched her tone, and absorbed every signal the industry kept sending. The message was clear: the real her was a bit too much for comfort. The edges got filed down. We learn that move young, a lot of us, and then we go around calling it professionalism.

Sound familiar?

Bet it does, because this is the thing handed quietly down to so many Black women. We get trained to scan every room, head off every bit of friction, carry everybody’s feelings while our own go sideways. Fold yourself into whatever shape reads as acceptable. Smile while you’re screaming inside. Nod when your whole spirit is yelling no. All that work is supposed to buy you a seat at the table, and still the seat never quite shows up.

Brown’s whole story talks back to that deal.

Everything shifted the day she stopped performing for approval and just showed up as herself. Doors that stayed shut for two decades finally opened. Four New York Times bestsellers sit on the record now. Two Children’s and Family Emmys share the shelf, one in 2023 for hosting Tab Time and another in 2026. Her McCormick seasoning line drew inspiration from the flavors she grew up with in her family’s kitchen. Clothing and home collections followed, finding their way into Target aisles. Fitting in built none of it. Refusing to fit in built all of it.

That sequence is the whole point, and I need the Sistas reading this to catch it. The wins did not come first and then grant her permission to breathe. Freedom came first, with no promises attached, back when the money was still a rumor. That choice cracked everything else open.

Boundaries did the heavy lifting.

Not the cute brunch kind of boundaries, all bath salts and wellness captions. I mean the plain, unglamorous kind. Saying no and letting it stand. Not treating your own peace like something you have to ration out to whoever shows up with a request. Brown has spoken about protecting her time and peace on purpose, without feeling obligated to explain herself. For a woman brought up to always be reachable and useful to others, that choice hits different.

That still registers as bold, when you sit with it. A Black woman standing in the open, picking herself first, done proving her worth by how worn out she lets herself get. Our mothers and grandmothers rarely got that door. Plenty of Black women back then made it through by staying useful to everybody, giving endlessly with little in return. Many passed on without ever stopping to ask who was looking after them.

So somebody like her showing another road lands heavier than a nice quote on a mug.

Freedom, the kind she keeps gesturing toward, was never about jars of seasoning or a spot on a bestseller list. Beneath the brand runs something plainer. You get to be exactly who you are, and no amount of pleasing other folks is the price of admission. Clapping is nice. Being real is the whole job.

Nobody’s acting like that comes free, though. Being your true self at work, family dinners, or even in group chats can come at a cost. People got close to the quiet version, and a few of them will not clap for the bigger one. Somebody will call you difficult. Another will grieve the woman who always said yes. Letting that disappointment exist, and standing it, is the toll for the life she’s talking about.

Worth every cent, though. Ask anybody who finally set the mask down.

What gets me most lately is how little strain shows on her. The Eden girl stays busy deep into 2026, with another children’s book on the way, a guest appearance on CBS’s Beyond the Gates, and more creative projects taking shape through her own production company. Tab Time keeps earning recognition, while her business ventures continue growing beyond the kitchen. Plenty on the plate. The frantic edge, though, seems to have given way to something steadier, the calm of a sister learning to work from a full cup instead of an empty one.

That’s the tell right there. When you quit performing for approval, the work quits feeling like bleeding.

For the Sistas who keep twisting themselves up, handling everybody’s needs, and worrying that dropping the act means losing the whole game, her life hands you a gentle correction. The mask was never what kept you safe. It was what kept you small. And small was never your assignment.

Black women have heard for generations that our fullness is a problem. We’re called loud, difficult, blunt, and far too sure of ourselves. One daughter of a little North Carolina town read that whole script, laid it down, and built a life on the very traits she was once told to hide. That garlic powder isn’t the lesson. The walking away is.

Permission is what she’s really handing out, once you listen past the seasoning. Quit auditioning for the room. Let down the folks who only ever loved your yes. Come home to yourself before giving your heart to anybody else.

Pick it up when you’re ready. It was always yours.

Staff Writer; Raven Jones

Raven writes about music, relationships, and the everyday ups and downs of Black women… She keeps it honest, encourages other sistas, and can be reached at RavenJ@ThySistas.com.

For the better part of two decades, the culture treated this actress like a group project nobody volunteered for. Folks dissected the marriage. Strangers weighed in on a scalp that was never theirs to touch. The 2022 Oscars sealed it, the night Will marched onto the stage and slapped a comedian over a joke about the baldness itself, turning her into a punchline she never wrote. By then she had already spoken openly about living with alopecia, an autoimmune condition that takes your hair whether you consent or not. Somehow the internet still decided that body belonged to the comment section.

Think about what that kind of attention does to a person over time. Every choice questioned, tears screenshotted, episodes of Red Table Talk clipped and twisted until “entanglement” became a word people tossed around with a smirk. A whole lot of us would have crumbled under half of it. Sistas know that particular weight, the one where you are expected to perform grace while strangers help themselves to your business and call it entertainment.

Then came Worthy, the 2023 memoir where she stopped letting other folks narrate her life. Buried inside those pages sat a revelation that knocked the wind clean out of the gossip machine: she and Will had quietly split back in 2016, though neither ever filed for divorce. People expected shame. What she offered instead was clarity. No apology for being complicated, no performance of the wounded wife, just a grown woman telling the truth on her own clock.

That pivot matters more than the tabloids ever understood. Somewhere along the way, Jada stopped reaching for the crowd’s permission. You can hear it in interviews and see it in how she moves through a room. The hunger to be liked, that thing so many carry around like a second purse, seems to have loosened its grip. And honestly, there is no freedom quite like the day you realize the jury was never qualified to judge you anyway.

Aging has a way of teaching that lesson, especially for Black women who spent their younger years being told to shrink, soften, or straighten something. Our fifties show up carrying a strange gift, since the energy once spent managing other people’s opinions suddenly becomes available for you. Nobody just hands Black women that kind of grace. You go and claim it, usually a good while after you had every right to it. Pinkett Smith reads like somebody who finally went and claimed hers. In public conversations, Jada has often discussed healing, personal growth, and the bond she shares with her mother, Adrienne. That slow inner work rarely trends online, but it can quietly rebuild a person from the inside out. These days, she appears more interested in defining her own life than defending it before strangers. Whatever peace she has found belongs to her, and she owes an explanation to exactly no one.

All of which raises the obvious question. What is Jada up to these days? Busier than you might guess.

This fall she walked back into the role that helped establish her career, Lena James, in Netflix’s revival of A Different World. The series dropped on September 24, exactly 39 years after the original introduced America to fictional Hillman College. Jasmine Guy and Kadeem Hardison returned as Whitley and Dwayne, now parents watching their daughter navigate campus life. For a generation raised on the HBCU magic of that show, seeing her step back onto Hillman’s grounds felt like a family cookout nobody wanted to leave. Months earlier she teased the news with a short caption that said everything anyone needed: “She back.”

The personal front has given folks plenty to whisper about too. This past July, People reported, citing an unnamed source, that she had moved back in with Will roughly two years earlier. Neither publicly confirmed the living arrangement, which leaves the details where they belong, between the two people involved. Back in January, Will and Jada appeared together at Paris Fashion Week to support their son Jaden. More family members joined them for another public appearance in June. Those moments showed a family capable of coming together, but they did not answer every question about the marriage. Maybe the couple has found an arrangement that works for them, or perhaps some things are still being figured out. Either way, their relationship is not a public referendum. Call it reconciliation or call it peace. The answer is nobody’s to assign but theirs.

And that, in the end, is the part worth sitting with. Not the Netflix comeback, and not the gossip about whose roof she sleeps under lately, but the way she holds herself through every bit of it. Here stands a Black woman who absorbed a mountain of judgment and came out the far side refusing to beg for a verdict. A lot of famous folks hit their fifties and scramble to stay in the spotlight, uneasy when the cameras turn away. The actress from Baltimore went the other way entirely. What she chose instead was substance, a hard earned stillness that took a while to show up, and no small amount of nerve. It takes that kind of courage to let the clapping fade out without running after the sound.

Black women catch this story fast, whether it gets told in the pew, the group chat, or the chair at the salon. Most of us have had a script pushed into our hands at some point, with orders to run it and smile while we do. So watching one of our own rip that thing up and start writing new lines, well, that lands somewhere close to healing. It says reinvention is not reserved for the young, that you can hit the middle of your life and decide the back half gets written in your own hand.

None of this means the critics fell silent. They never do. There will always be somebody ready to analyze her face, pick apart the marriage, and question the choices. The difference is that she no longer sits in the audience waiting on their rating. That stage sits behind her now, and the view from where she stands looks a whole lot calmer.

Fifty-five, it turns out, is not an ending. For Jada Pinkett Smith, it reads more like a homecoming. A chance to stop chasing everybody else’s expectations and walk, unbothered, back into your own skin. Sistas, that is the lesson worth tucking away. Peace was never going to arrive from the crowd. It was always waiting on the other side of no longer needing them.

Staff Writer: Brenda Poole

BP writes about entertainment, relationships, faith, and life in general… She enjoys speaking on things Black women can relate to and hopefully giving a sista something useful along the way…

Feel free to email her at BrendaP@ThySistas.com.

Let that marinate a minute. Born in 1959 in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, Tunie trained at Carnegie Mellon and began building her career in 1981. More than four decades later, she has added her first Emmy to a résumé already decorated with major honors. Some folks would call that late. I call it right on time.

Here is what gets me, though. Our culture has a nasty habit of treating a woman like a carton of milk, stamping an expiration date on her gifts and acting shocked when she keeps pouring long past it. Thirty is “still fresh.” Forty earns a side-eye. Fifty invites the whispers, and by the moment you hit your sixties they have practically drafted the obituary on your relevance. Somebody ought to tell Ms. Tunie about that expiration date. She spent more than two decades appearing as medical examiner Melinda Warner on Law & Order: SVU. Along the way, she co-produced the Tony-winning musical Spring Awakening and collected an Obie in 2016. By 2023, she was directing a musical about Dorothy Dandridge. That is no résumé winding down. It reads like a performer just warming up.

So why did this particular recognition take so long to land? The answer is not complicated, and most of us already know it. Hollywood has never quite figured out what to do with a seasoned sister who refuses to fade politely into the background. It will hand her the mama roles, the judge roles, the stern physician who delivers hard news in two scenes and disappears. Rarely does the machine build a whole world around her and say, here, this is yours, carry it. CBS finally did exactly that.

She stepped into Beyond the Gates in February of 2025 as Anita Dupree, matriarch of a wealthy, complicated family doing its best to hold together. That show broke ground the minute it premiered. It became the first American daytime soap with a predominantly Black cast since Generations debuted back in 1989, and people felt it. Nobody around here tuned in out of politeness. They came home to it, weekday afternoons on CBS, streaming on Paramount Plus, two o’clock Eastern, a whole community pulling up a chair for Anita the way you show up for blood kin.

Then the storyline turned, and so did her performance. Her character received a triple-negative breast cancer diagnosis, an aggressive form of the disease. Tunie portrayed that struggle with such grace that grown folks were reaching for tissues across the country. She understood the responsibility that came with portraying an illness affecting so many real families. Tunie approached the material with care, hoping the storyline would encourage women to pay closer attention to their health. Truth of that sort cannot be manufactured. You earn it through years of living, listening, and learning how to make another person’s pain feel real.

When nomination morning came around, this freshman series pulled fifteen nods in its very debut round of eligibility. Fifteen. Tunie and her on-screen daughter, Karla Mosley, became the first two Black actresses ever recognized together in the lead performance category. Mind you, that competition has been running since the Nixon years, and it took until now for the door to swing wide enough for two Sistas to stroll through at once.

Here is the part I need my Sistas to really sit with. The timeline this world keeps handing us was never ours in the first place. Black women have always bloomed on a clock nobody else knows how to read. Our grandmothers launched whole enterprises out of their kitchens at fifty. Mamas marched back into classrooms at forty-five with babies balanced on a hip. We have been labeled “too late” since girlhood, and we kept rising anyway, supper on the stove, diploma on the wall, dream still breathing underneath it all. Tamara did not peak at twenty-five. This woman is reaching new heights at sixty-seven, and she is not waiting on anybody’s blessing to do it.

Consider what the years on that road actually build. A young star gets handed raw ability and a lucky break. The veteran earns something money cannot rush into being: depth. Black women have been running that game forever, turning each delay into range. Think about talented actresses who watched parts slip away to someone younger or lighter. Doors shut without apology, rejection letters arrived, and still they kept moving. Those experiences can leave scars, but they can also deepen an artist’s understanding of the world. So when a role comes along that demands grief, survival, and faith under fire, a seasoned performer like Tunie knows how to make every emotion count. That gold did not show up late. It arrived at a moment when her talent was impossible to ignore.

We do our daughters real harm when we teach them the window is narrow. Tell a child she must arrive by thirty and you hand her a reason to quit at thirty-one. Point her instead toward Tamara, the choir girl out of a Pennsylvania steel town who studied her craft and pursued acting in New York. She kept her name in rotation for four solid decades before earning her first Emmy. The sweetest part came when she dedicated that victory to her 92-year-old mother, Evelyn, who traveled across the country to watch her daughter receive the honor. Imagine being that mama, witnessing your grown baby finally collect an award she had worked decades to earn. Now that is a story worth framing on the wall.

And she is nowhere near finished. Even this fall, she is back on the Atlanta set living inside Anita’s fight, handing daytime something it rarely gets to witness. She holds a seat on the board of trustees at her alma mater, directs, produces, and makes room to lift the ones climbing up behind her. The statue is new, yet the labor it honors has been flowing out of her since well before most of today’s “it girls” drew their very breath.

So to every sister feeling that clock tick a little too loud, let this moment be your receipt. You have not waited too long to finish the degree, open the business, or chase the calling you shelved for everybody else’s sake. Your richest chapter is not behind you simply because a calendar insists on it. Black women do not expire. We ripen instead, growing sharper, braver, more fully ourselves with each year we are blessed enough to see.

Sixty-seven, and the queen is just getting warm. Go on and glow, Ms. Tunie. Some of us have been waiting our entire lives to watch one of our own take her sweet time and still arrive right on schedule.

Staff Writer: Brenda Poole

BP writes about entertainment, relationships, faith, and life in general… She enjoys speaking on things Black women can relate to and hopefully giving a sista something useful along the way…

Feel free to email her at BrendaP@ThySistas.com.

The movie is called Second Chance Holiday, and it lands on the Roku Channel this coming Thursday, November 5. Chelsey, the character, is a dating expert convinced some curse gets her dumped every December. Matthew Daddario plays the love interest, a high school sweetheart who comes back into her life. It is Curry’s first time carrying a feature film, top of the call sheet, and she got there at thirty seven. Let that sit a minute. Hollywood loves a fresh young face. This is a grown mama walking through the door anyway, dragging a dream she never did put down.

Folks forget this part. Way before the arena lights and all those Warriors banners, a teenager named Ayesha Alexander packed herself off to Los Angeles chasing the acting bug at seventeen. The gigs were small. Audition rooms swallowed entire afternoons and gave back almost nothing. Then she reconnected with a certain point guard she had first met at church back in Charlotte. Love grew, the babies started coming, and acting went into a drawer while bigger, louder blessings crowded the counter. Fifteen years married. Food ventures, magazine covers, and a face everybody recognized. The acting, though, kept knocking from inside that drawer.

I think about that drawer a lot, honestly. So many of us have one.

Black women are praised endlessly for how much they carry. The job, the babies, aging parents, church responsibilities, even the group chat where everybody comes to cry. They call it strength. It is, too. But strength can quietly become the bars you live behind. You carry everybody so well and so long that your own bag never gets unpacked. That dream you had at nineteen sits in a hall closet, buried beneath Christmas decorations, waiting for its turn. Once the kids are grown, maybe. Someday after the promotion. Later, is what you really mean. And later has a way of never showing up.

So watching this particular sister crack open a suitcase left shut for a decade does something to the spirit.

The work had already been building quietly, the piece nobody prints in a headline. Irish Wish stuck her next to Lindsay Lohan in 2024. A year later came a turn in the Hulu film Joy to the World. Then came a voice role in the 2026 animated sports comedy GOAT. None of it out front. All of it reps. Every little part another brick toward the house finally in view. Nobody arrives overnight. It takes years of swinging in the dark while the crowd is off somewhere else, clapping for other people.

And the other ventures never slowed down either. Sweet July, Curry’s lifestyle brand, and its skincare line, Sweet July Skin, run alongside the cookbooks, television work, and restaurant ventures she has built. Curry is not abandoning one lane to merge into a different one. The whole highway is getting wider instead, which feels like the more honest model anyway. Nobody offered a slower pace the day actress joined the roster. She just made room.

Steph, to his credit, has been loud about all of it. He posted the trailer and called her his leading lady, and fifteen years in, a husband cheering that openly for his wife’s separate shine is worth noticing. Partnership that lets both people chase the spotlight, not only the one with the famous jump shot. Plenty of households could stand to study that arrangement.

Now, I’m not going to sit here and pretend a Roku Christmas rom com is high cinema. It’s cozy, it’s corny, and that’s precisely the point of the genre. What matters is not the film’s Rotten Tomatoes future. The real headline sits in the quiet announcement underneath it. A grown mother of four looked at a passion shelved in her younger years and decided it was not too late to pick it back up.

How many of us need to hear exactly that this week?

With the holidays approaching, so many Black women vanish into everybody else’s joy. We cook the feast, wrap the gifts, host the cousins, and somehow finish the year further from our own wishes than when it started. Here comes Ayesha, playing a character literally trying to break a holiday curse, while the actress herself breaks a far more real one off camera. Art and life rhyming a little too neatly.

There’s a lesson tucked in there for Sistas of a certain age especially. The forties and fifties are not the clearance aisle of ambition. They can be the opening act. Our mothers and grandmothers often did not get that memo, pouring themselves out completely and calling it love, which it was, yet also a kind of erasure nobody questioned. This generation gets to question it. We get to want things out loud. A degree at fifty. Maybe a business at forty eight. A move across the country for no reason but yourself. One first leading role in a feature film after close to two decades of being told to stay in the supporting cast of your own biography.

None of this diminishes the wife part or the mama part, and I’ll be clear about that. Those roles are sacred, and the devotion to them is real. The point is simpler and bigger at once. A person can be devoted to family and still refuse to vanish inside it. Love and ambition were never actually enemies. We just got raised to believe one had to starve so the other could eat.

So Thursday night, when that movie drops, I might just make some tea and settle in. Not because I expect an Oscar. Because I want to see a sister stepping back into a dream she never let die. That image alone is worth a free streaming channel and an evening of corny holiday romance.

Black women have always been more than the labels stapled onto us. Bigger than wife. Deeper than mother. Wider than being everybody’s helper, the family backbone, or a woman expected to hold it all together. We are also the dreamers who get to have our own second act, right out in the open, no apology attached.

Ayesha is just reminding us. Open that drawer, Sistas. I suspect you already know what’s waiting inside.

Staff Writer: Brenda Poole

BP writes about entertainment, relationships, faith, and life in general… She enjoys speaking on things Black women can relate to and hopefully giving a sista something useful along the way…

Feel free to email her at BrendaP@ThySistas.com.

So here is the part that should not require saying out loud. A grown woman can date whoever she pleases, full stop. Nobody owes an explanation for choosing joy. Besides, some of those same aunties clutching pearls over a younger man were cutting the Electric Slide at somebody’s second wedding last summer. Age gaps are not the crisis. Our community has bigger fish to fry than a birthday certificate.

What deserves real attention runs deeper than the math.

Cole has never hidden her scars. She grew up knowing what addiction could do to a family, and in 2021 it took her mother Frankie for good. Most stars would hand that kind of grief to a publicist and keep it moving, but she said the hard part out loud, more than once. That is why the talk around Skrilla sits heavy for some of us. The rapper has spoken openly about past drug use and the changes he has been trying to make in his life. In a January 2026 interview, he described being more sober than before and taking a more disciplined approach to his music. Give the man credit for being honest and making an effort to grow. His past deserves acknowledgment, but it would be unfair to assume those struggles define where he stands today. Personal growth takes work, and everybody deserves room to show they are doing it.

Two people can enter a relationship carrying painful histories, and healing is not what you automatically get. Sometimes love becomes a place where both people grow stronger. Other times, you get two people drowning in identical water, each convinced they are teaching the other to swim. That is a possibility worth understanding in any relationship, not a judgment about what Keyshia and Skrilla may have going on behind closed doors.

Before Skrilla, there was Hunxho, another young talent who was 24 when she went public with their relationship back in 2024. He is 27 now. Same age gap conversation, different chapter. Folks had jokes then too, and she blocked out the noise the way she always has. No shade to her taste whatsoever. The younger men she has dated are gifted and magnetic, but age alone cannot tell us whether somebody has done the work of growing up. That part shows in how a person treats you, handles responsibility, and carries himself when life stops being fun.

Much of her heart has played out on television and timelines for twenty years now, from the early reality days through every headline since. People watch a woman grow up on camera and start believing her business is theirs to run. The internet hands out that boldness for free. What gets lost in all that shouting is the only part that counts: whether she is happy away from the cameras, feels safe, and can still be herself.

Let me pull up a chair and talk to my Sistas for a minute, because we left the gossip about one singer a ways back.

Here is the truth we keep learning the hard way. Being somebody’s woman should never mean misplacing your own self in the process. You can be head over heels and still hold your line without apology. Caring about him does not mean you go blind to the warning signs waving in your face. Too many of us came up on that old story, the one that swears a good woman just fixes, waits, forgives, and takes whatever is handed to her. That belief has buried too many of our mothers and aunties in situations that drained them bone dry.

Black women give and give. We nurture, we defend, we build brothers up and then watch them stroll the finished product over to somebody new. Our capacity for devotion is a superpower and a snare, depending entirely on who holds the other end.

So the real question for Keyshia, and honestly for every one of us watching, is not whether the age gap matters. It is whether she stays whole, whatever the nature of her connection with Skrilla and wherever it might lead. If romance is part of the picture, does it add to her life or quietly subtract? When the cameras cut and the glow of the timeline fades, is there peace in her world? Does she feel supported and appreciated, or is she carrying burdens that should never have been hers to manage? Those are questions worth asking about love in general, not assumptions about what happens in her private life.

A relationship built on rescuing is not a relationship. It is a job with terrible benefits.

None of this means she belongs alone. Companionship at 45 is beautiful, and a confident sister choosing a vibrant mate can absolutely flourish when both arrive healthy. The concern here reaches beyond Keyshia herself. Skrilla has publicly discussed past substance use, while Cole knows firsthand what addiction can do to a family. Neither fact proves there is trouble between them, and his more recent comments about sobriety deserve to be taken seriously. Still, their experiences remind us that love cannot replace the personal responsibility healing requires. Two people can support each other through difficult seasons, but neither should have to carry the entire weight of the other’s recovery.

Real love tends to be quiet, if we are honest about it. It looks like somebody who keeps his word, shows up consistently, and has already done the work of growing up before entering your life. Anybody can bring fireworks. What almost nobody brings is steadiness, the slow dependable kind that keeps a heart safe long after the spark settles down.

Cole is moving at full speed these days, and that grind is a big reason folks pull for her the way they do. She records, tours, and commands a stage decades into a career that could have folded a dozen times over. You cannot fake that kind of staying power. My hope is that she pours a sliver of that same fire into guarding her own peace the way she guards her setlist.

Sistas, hear me good. Your companion can be fine, talented, and crazy about you, and the thing can still cost more than it hands back. Watch the patterns, not only the chemistry. A rescue project today will need rescuing tomorrow, and the day after, until your whole identity shrinks down to being his lifeguard.

Keyshia Cole owes us nothing in the way of a different choice. What she does owe herself is an honest one. If Skrilla is grounded, growing, and good to her, then God bless the both of them and let the haters stay salty. Nobody watching from the outside knows enough to declare otherwise. But should any woman find herself loving someone through serious personal struggles, she must remember that devotion has limits. Addiction, when it is present, requires more than promises and affection. Recovery belongs to the person doing the recovering, and no measure of loyalty can do that work for him. That particular fight is one nobody wins by caring harder.

Black women deserve people who meet them at their level, not projects dressed up as princes. We have earned the right to be chosen by somebody who takes responsibility for his own growth. Dating younger was never the sin. Disappearing into anybody, at any age, is the thing that quietly steals the shine from strong Black women who hand the world their best and forget to save a little for themselves.

Whatever unfolds next for Keyshia, I am pulling hard for the version of this story where she keeps her name, nerve, and self respect fully intact.

Staff Writer; Raven Jones

Raven writes about music, relationships, and the everyday ups and downs of Black women… She keeps it honest, encourages other sistas, and can be reached at RavenJ@ThySistas.com.

Here is what Coco Jones said back, cool as morning water. “I’m Black, and I’m proud.” Then she blew the woman a kiss and got back to work.

Five words and a kiss. That was the whole clapback.

I keep rewatching that footage, and what gets me is how little the heckler actually rattled her. Coco was outside the Tommy Hilfiger show, in her bag, doing her job. Some stranger tried to turn her skin into a punishment, and she just declined the offer. No lecture, no scene, no raised voice. She let the comment die right there on the pavement.

Let me tell you why this hit the way it did.

Dark-skinned girls grow up being measured against a ruler nobody asked for. We catch the comments early, from folks who look like us and folks who do not. Pretty for a dark-skinned girl. You would be gorgeous a shade or two lighter. Stay out the sun. Coco has spoken about this herself, how colorism was not something she picked up so much as something handed to her. The quiet lesson was that certain girls got the jobs and the praise while others waited in the wings. During a 2025 appearance on Sway in the Morning, Coco discussed those experiences and refused to accept the industry’s narrow standards of beauty. You could hear that same conviction in the sidewalk clip.

What struck me was the ease. She did not perform outrage for the camera. There was no breakdown, no venomous comeback, though heaven knows she had the right. Instead she gave the heckler exactly nothing to feed on, and handed the rest of us a master class.

Now I want to be careful here, because there is a trap in praising Black women for staying graceful under fire. We have been applauded for our composure so long that composure started to feel like a job requirement. Smile through it. Rise above. Be the bigger person. Sistas have carried that assignment since forever, and it is bone-tired work. So let me say it plain. Coco did not owe that woman a kiss. She did not owe anybody poise. What makes her response land is not that she suppressed herself. It is that she chose her own peace over a stranger’s chaos, and peace, when you pick it on purpose, is its own kind of power.

That distinction matters for every Black woman reading this. You are allowed to be unbothered because it suits you, not because the world expects you to swallow insults with a grin.

The angle I keep coming back to is simpler than the think pieces will make it. Black women’s beauty was never up for a vote. Somebody else’s prejudice tells you about their small heart, their bad home training, and their need to shrink a stranger just to stand tall for a second. It is not a verdict on us. Coco understood that in real time, which is harder than it sounds when the venom is aimed at your actual face on a public street.

And can we talk about the timing, because this is a sister in full bloom. Coco Jones is not some hopeful waiting for a seat at the table. A Grammy win for “ICU” already proved she belonged there. Her debut album, Why Not More?, arrived in 2025 and debuted in the top ten of Billboard’s Top R&B Albums chart. An expanded edition brought an Alicia Keys collaboration that had folks hollering. Sold-out crowds across the States and Europe showed up for the tour, and this past summer, “Body So Tea” reminded everybody her voice is a whole event. Over on the acting side, Coco appeared in Malcolm D. Lee’s thriller Strung for Peacock and finished her run as Hilary Banks on Bel-Air. The romantic comedy That’s Her added another milestone, with a starring role and an executive producer credit. Earlier in the year, the whole country heard her sing “Lift Every Voice and Sing” during the Super Bowl pregame ceremony.

So picture it. A heckler tried to make a dark-skinned woman feel small during a season when Coco is everywhere, winning. She’s newly married and building the kind of career most people only daydream about. The nerve. Imagine being that pressed over a sister who was minding her business and looking good while she did it.

None of this is new, by the way. Our mothers and grandmothers were telling us the same thing with a look across the kitchen before we had the words for it. Your worth is not up for debate with somebody who already decided to miss it. So keep your eyes on your own plate. Finish the shoot, pack up the lights, move to the next corner, and let that woman holler at the spot where you used to be standing.

I think often about the young ones who will see that clip. The babies already learning to resent their reflection because somebody in the cafeteria made a joke about their color. I hope they watch her and clock what confidence actually looks like. It is quiet. There is no reaching for the last word. It just keeps glowing while the hater runs clean out of breath.

Black women have always been the standard, long before the industry started catching up and calling our features a trend. Coco Jones just reminded a whole timeline of that truth, on a loud New York corner, with a kiss and five little words. She never shrank. Neither should you. And to every sista who needed to hear it today, your face was never the problem. Their eyes were.

Staff Writer; Raven Jones

Raven writes about music, relationships, and the everyday ups and downs of Black women… She keeps it honest, encourages other sistas, and can be reached at RavenJ@ThySistas.com.

Tiffany is 46 now, and by any scoreboard the woman is winning. Grammy on the shelf. An Emmy earned in 2018 for that Saturday Night Live hosting gig the year before, which happened to be the same year Girls Trip blew her up into somebody your mama knew by name. These days, fall of 2026, she is still performing stand-up shows around the country. Her Peacock series, Tiffany Haddish Goes Off, is available to stream, following the month she spent traveling through Africa with three of her closest girls. There is also talk of a Girls Trip sequel, though the project remains in development. The calendar is stuffed.

Thing is, the jokes did not start as a paycheck. They started as a way to stay alive. Go back far enough and you find a kid in South Central whose mama got into a terrible car wreck that left her with permanent brain damage. Tiffany was barely nine, suddenly the oldest acting like the adult, helping look after four younger brothers and sisters. Foster care came at thirteen. Three foster homes and two group homes followed before her grandmother took her in. Some of those experiences left wounds that would take years to understand. Then picture that same child reaching ninth grade while struggling to read, doing everything she could to keep her classmates from finding out. Heavy is not a strong enough word for it.

Somewhere in there a counselor gave her a fork in the road: therapy, or the comedy camp over at the Laugh Factory. Guess what a wounded teenager chose. For Tiffany, that comedy camp opened a door she desperately needed. A good joke worked like armor back then. Get the bullies cracking up and, just like that, they are not aiming at you anymore. For a minute, nobody can touch the scared girl underneath. That is how making people howl stopped being about showing off and turned into a way of getting through the day in one piece.

Which brings me to the whole point, and it is something a lot of Black women are going to feel right in the chest. Funny and happy do not always travel together. Not even close, some days. A sister can be out here giving away joy by the armful and still drive home with something sitting heavy that nobody at the cookout ever noticed. We get raised on it, plenty of us. Keep it together. Crack the joke at the repast so your auntie can finally exhale. Hold the whole crew up and swallow the question of who exactly is holding you.

That job wears on a body, and Tiffany has not hidden what some of those experiences cost her. She has said a police cadet raped her when she was seventeen, just one more thing piled on a stack that was already too tall. Still the world wants its comic queen switched on, ready with a quote, never off the clock. Think about that for a second. You walk out there to send a room home grinning on the exact night your own insides feel like wet cement. Nobody in those seats has a clue. That is sort of the cruel genius of the whole thing, because they are not supposed to.

Back in 2017 she put a heavy chunk of all this down on paper in her book, The Last Black Unicorn. That title alone says plenty about how isolated the girl felt coming up, like the mold got broken and nobody else came out matching her. Here is the part that gets me though. Tiffany never climbed out of that pain without a scratch, and she has never once claimed otherwise. What she pulled off was sneakier than that. The woman took her ugliest years and chopped them into jokes that could patch up a stranger’s whole day while they sat there doubled over wheezing. For sisters who recognize pieces of their own childhood in those pages, her memoir can feel deeply personal. It is like somebody finally said out loud what they had kept to themselves their entire lives.

There is something worth sitting with here that has not one thing to do with Hollywood. Comedy can be a present and a disguise wrapped in the same box. Most Black women reading this already have somebody in mind. Maybe it is an auntie, a coworker, or the first lady at church who keeps the whole function rolling. Yet she cannot remember the last time a living soul asked how she was really doing. We figure the clowns are fine. Lean on them without blinking. Then we act all shocked when one of them finally buckles.

Give Tiffany her flowers though, because the woman appears to be writing a different kind of chapter for herself. She has spoken about her faith, about counseling, and about learning to protect a little peace she can call hers. Turned into a real advocate too for foster kids, supporting young people facing struggles she remembers from her own childhood. Black women do not always get told it is alright to come apart, so hearing one speak openly about her painful experiences can feel like getting handed a permission slip. Her past is part of her story, but it does not have to be the whole story. Nobody outside her circle knows exactly how she feels behind closed doors. What we can see is a woman using her voice for more than punch lines, and maybe that is worth celebrating all by itself.

So here is where I leave you. Next time that big cackle comes busting out of your TV, go on and enjoy it, just let a second thought ride shotgun. There is a real human being back there who figured out how to be funny so the grief would not pull her all the way under. Sistas, take that as your assignment. Go check on the comedian in your own circle. Actually ask the entertainer how she is holding up, then get quiet and let her answer. Making everybody else happy is a gift and a calling. And making sure that person gets her own turn at happy, that part is on the rest of us.

Staff Writer: Brenda Poole

BP writes about entertainment, relationships, faith, and life in general… She enjoys speaking on things Black women can relate to and hopefully giving a sista something useful along the way…

Feel free to email her at BrendaP@ThySistas.com.

Let me catch anybody up who got here late. Since her 1990 breakthrough, Mariah Carey has written or co-written eighteen of her nineteen Billboard Hot 100 number-one hits. Not just sang them. Helped create them. The Long Island kid grew into one of the most accomplished songwriters this country has produced, and I say that with paperwork behind me, not fandom. When “Vision of Love” introduced her that first year, most ears caught the acrobatics and missed the architecture underneath. She co-wrote that song with Ben Margulies, shaping a melody and vocal arrangement that announced something special. The phrasing, the way the song builds, the way a bridge lifts you right when your chest needs it. All of it revealed a young woman who understood how to make a record reach people.

Sit with that picture a minute. A girl barely out of high school walks into boardrooms stacked with seasoned men in an industry that often preferred to package young women rather than recognize their creative authority. Yet she arrives with songwriting credits already attached to her work and a clear idea of how she wants her music to sound. Her debut single was produced by Rhett Lawrence, with additional production by Narada Michael Walden, but Carey’s writing was part of the foundation from the beginning. Over time, she would take an increasingly active role in producing her records as well. For a young artist in a business built on other people’s ownership, having that creative voice mattered.

This is where the songwriting deserves its flowers. Take “Hero.” Underneath all the vocal gymnastics sits a flat, plainspoken pep talk about finding your own backbone, the sort of thing an auntie tells you while you are falling apart. “We Belong Together” gets at something trickier. The words move the way heartbreak really moves, circling around memories, songs playing on the radio, and the painful realization of what has been lost. Specifics are the whole difference between somebody who sings and somebody who writes, and Carey loads her best records with them. Think of it as a diary slipped inside a radio single. More than twenty years later, people still turn to those cuts for comfort, celebration, and remembrance. That tells you plenty about what she was really making.

Then comes her ear for where the culture was heading. Back in 1995, the remix of “Fantasy” paired that honeyed hook with Ol’ Dirty Bastard, and the gatekeepers clutched their pearls. She pushed anyway. The collaboration helped establish a blueprint for the marriage of hip-hop and pop melody that we now treat as a regular part of popular music. Plenty of stars topping charts today, the ones who sing sweet over a hard drum and drop a rapper into verse two, are walking a road she helped pave. Praise rarely travels backward to the architect, though, especially when the architect happens to be a Sista.

Listen to what younger artists keep saying about the singers who shaped them. Ariana Grande has openly acknowledged Mariah Carey as a major influence, and you can hear echoes of that approach across generations of pop and R&B performers. Those careful runs, layered harmonies, and moments when a soft phrase suddenly opens into something enormous do not happen by accident. Study the phrasing on a tender slow jam and you will hear her fingerprints pressed into the top line. Younger Sistas study those techniques, practice them, and build their own sounds from what they have learned. That is part of how R&B keeps growing. Call it what it is. Black women keep getting waved off as just naturally gifted, when the truer story is hard, deliberate labor, the kind you grind at until it changes what the genre sounds like.

Now stack the mogul brain on top, because this is the piece that stays buried. “The Emancipation of Mimi” was no cute title. Mimi chose that word deliberately after reclaiming a stronger sense of creative freedom following a brutal public stretch, and the project became one of the defining comebacks the charts have ever seen. She understood the importance of songwriting credits, publishing rights, and having a meaningful say in the music released under her name. That does not mean she owned every master recording in her catalog. Her songwriting gave her a financial and creative stake beyond performing somebody else’s material. Our Sistas in this business have been shorted for generations, their work lifted and their checks clipped, so an artist who fought for greater creative control and recognition belongs in business school case studies, not just karaoke bars.

In 2022 the Songwriters Hall of Fame finally put it in writing, bringing her in alongside the Neptunes and the Isley Brothers. Understand what that room is. It honors the pen, not merely the performance, and its membership represents a select company of writers whose compositions have left a lasting mark on music. Carey entered that room with eighteen self-written or co-written number-one singles already to her credit. That is a remarkable achievement by any standard. The honor put an official stamp on something her songwriting credits had been saying for decades. An elite writer had been tucked inside that famous throat the whole time.

Which brings us to the present, because the lady has not slowed down one bit. In September 2025 she dropped her sixteenth studio album, “Here For It All,” her first since 2018’s “Caution.” This past July she released an expanded anniversary edition of “Daydream,” packed with previously unreleased material, live performances, and remixes. Additional physical editions arrived in October. On October 30 she marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of “Glitter” with a deluxe reissue, reclaiming an era the press once mocked her over. Come winter she carries her holiday spectacle to UK arenas, with Birmingham on November 27, London on November 30, and Manchester on December 2. She has even hinted that more music could arrive in 2027, although no official release date has been announced. Rest, apparently, is nowhere on the agenda.

I need the young folks reading this to catch the real lesson underneath. Black women are not the scenery in American music. We write the songs, we run the sessions, we sign the checks and sketch the blueprint everybody after us borrows from. So when a culture hollers about the bodies of Black women and goes mute on their minds, it is telling you flat out what it actually values. Clapping for the high notes is fine, pretty even. That part is only the paint, though. Under it sits a mind that built a catalog, fought for what it was worth, and helped drag a whole industry around to her own taste.

So this December, when a certain holiday record comes on and your cousin starts carrying on about the big note, go ahead and cut in. Tell them she co-wrote that. Add that she co-produced it with Walter Afanasieff, too. The real gift was never just the sound. It was a woman thinking three or four moves ahead, helping create something that would still be standing once the tinsel came down. Anybody can entertain a room for a night. Mimi helped build something that has lasted for generations, and her name is written all over it.

Staff Writer: Brenda Poole

BP writes about entertainment, relationships, faith, and life in general… She enjoys speaking on things Black women can relate to and hopefully giving a sista something useful along the way…

Feel free to email her at BrendaP@ThySistas.com.

On October 22, 2025, inside the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center, she took her final bow with American Ballet Theatre. Golden glitter rained down over her. Oprah Winfrey rose to speak. Debbie Allen did too. At forty-three, after twenty-five years with the company, this ballerina chose that night to close the chapter on the institution that made her a household name. “It’s been 25 years at ABT, and I think it’s time,” she had told the Associated Press that summer. She had already made peace with her decision. No tremble, no apology.

Let me ask my Sistas to sit with something for a minute. Most of what we hear, from the time we are girls, tells a grown sister to keep holding on. Hold the title. Keep the paycheck, the applause, the name they call you when they walk you up to the microphone at the banquet. Leaving gets painted as losing. Step off and folks figure you ran out of gas, or that the young ones finally caught you. So it rattles a room when a sister at the top of her craft looks around and says, “I’m done with this chapter.” And means it. That kind of honesty takes more courage than most people realize.

Think about where she started. A little girl who found the barre at thirteen, which in that unforgiving world is practically ancient. Raised without much money, sleeping some nights in a motel room with her siblings, she climbed anyway. In June 2015, she became the first African American woman promoted to principal dancer in American Ballet Theatre’s seventy-five-year history. Just days earlier, she had danced the lead in Swan Lake before a packed, gloriously mixed audience. That promotion reached past the personal. For Black women who had been told, in a thousand small ways, that certain rooms were not built for us, her presence under those lights rewrote the blueprint.

And yet the thing I keep turning over is not the climbing. It is the letting go.

Because walking away from a celebrated life is not surrender. Hear me clearly on that. Surrender is quitting something you still believe in because the fight got too hard. Copeland did the opposite of quit. For twenty-five years, she poured herself into American Ballet Theatre. Leaving the company did not mean abandoning her love of dance. The applause was never what made her somebody. A woman who understands that no longer needs the crowd to remind her of her worth.

Some people call that maturity. Maybe. What I can tell you is this cannot be rushed and cannot be bought. It tends to arrive the day you stop sizing yourself up by the one thing that made your name and start wondering what else life might have waiting for you.

So what does a life look like nearly a year after a woman takes her final bow with the company that helped make her name?

For her, busier than you’d guess. The former American Ballet Theatre star, now forty-four, has been recovering from a hip replacement, and she does not pretty up the changes her body has been through. In interviews, Copeland has spoken openly about perimenopause. Aches, brain fog, and shifting rhythms are things many of us discuss only with our closest girlfriends, if we bring them up at all. Candor like that is a real gift for Black women, so many of us raised to look unbothered while our bodies are changing in ways we barely understand. And anybody who assumed her retirement meant she would never dance again got a surprise in March. Copeland appeared on the Academy Awards stage during a musical tribute to Sinners, wearing a historic Firebird costume and moving before millions of viewers. She was still dancing, only now on terms that looked different from the demands of a full ballet company schedule. That is a different kind of freedom.

The foundation she established back in 2021 keeps widening its reach. Its flagship afterschool program, BE BOLD, now operates at twenty-two sites across Harlem and the Bronx, bringing free ballet lessons to hundreds of children who might otherwise never have that opportunity. For a whole generation of Black women who remember looking for themselves in the world of classical dance, that kind of access is long, long overdue. Alongside the original program, she developed BE BOLD Next Steps, helping promising young dancers pursue more serious training, plus BE BOLDER, a wellness offering built for folks fifty and up. That alone tells you she understands something important about who gets to move and who gets invited into the room.

This spring the organization held its first major benefit to support its work. Beyond all of it, Copeland served on the host committee for the 2026 Met Gala and sits on the boards of Lincoln Center and The Shed. In October, she was elected a Civic Trustee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, another seat at a table where important decisions get made. And on October 19, she received the Michael Kors Award for Inspiring Philanthropy at the Golden Heart Awards. Think about that, Sistas. A woman once celebrated for what she could do under a spotlight is now being honored for what she helps other people accomplish. The stage has changed, but the impact keeps growing.

Then there are the books. Her children’s series continued last year with Bunheads, Act 2: The Dance of Courage, a story about friendship, disappointment, and finding the nerve to keep moving when plans fall apart. In August, she released Firebird Waltz, the first novel in her Star Fire Academy fantasy series, opening another imaginative world for young readers. Through those pages, she keeps returning to an idea worth carrying into our own lives. Joy, not perfection, ought to have a place in whatever we choose to become. Read that again, Sistas. Joy over perfection. That is grown woman wisdom, hard won and worth repeating.

A lot of us carry a quiet terror about this exact moment in our own stories. The job that defined us. That role everybody praises us for. An identity we have carried so long we forgot we were carrying it. Who would I even be without this? That one question has kept more than one of us stuck in the same chair for years, doing work that quit fitting ages ago.

Misty hands us another way to see it. An ending chosen on purpose is not a loss. It is a door. Today, she is raising her son Jackson and building programs that open doors for others. Copeland also speaks plainly about the changes a woman’s body goes through. And yes, she’s still the barrier breaker who changed the face of an entire art form. A return to the stage can happen on her own terms, without the demands of a full ballet company schedule. None of that requires her to keep proving she belongs in a place where she already made history. Loving something deeply does not mean you must hold on to it in exactly the same way forever.

Starting over takes its own brand of guts. If you have ever lain awake asking whether you missed your window, whether the next thing is silly at your age or just more than you can carry, look at this woman and take some of that nerve for yourself. You get to shut one book and crack open the next. Nobody has to sign off on that but you.

A last bow, done right, does not have to close everything. Copeland stepped into the light of everything she had accomplished, gave the crowd its due, and walked toward the next chapter of her story. Nearly a year later, that story is still unfolding. New stages and responsibilities have opened up, along with opportunities to change lives through the work she continues to build. Copeland just showed the rest of us how it looks. The applause was never what made us worthy. Our worth remains long after the cheering fades.

Staff Writer; Raven Jones

Raven writes about music, relationships, and the everyday ups and downs of Black women… She keeps it honest, encourages other sistas, and can be reached at RavenJ@ThySistas.com.