My artistic style flows directly from my writing. When I write, images rise naturally to illustrate my stories. The text below is the inspiration behind this piece.
 When I think of brave hearts who have turned fear into courage, Black women who have faced the double burden of gender and race come to mind. One giant for me is Mississippian Fannie Lou Hamer. Hamer had ample reason to be overcome by fear as a Black female activist during the Civil Rights Era. She was harassed by the Ku Klux Klan and endured police beatings that permanently disabled her. I wonder what experiences helped transform her fear into courage as she joined the Civil Rights Movement, fought to register voters, founded a political party and challenged a president. As a mother, I wonder if a major turning point was when her daughter died because the local hospital refused to treat the child of a civil rights activist. Did her courage derive from a state of detachment as someone who had lost so much? “I guess if I’d had any sense, I’d a been a little scared,” Hamer once said. “But what was the point of being scared? The only thing they could do was kill me, and it seemed like they’d been trying to do that a little bit at a time since I could remember.”
From my book Walking on Earth with Thich Nhat Hanh (P.177)