Rowland’s New EP ‘K’ Releases Today, Plus She’s Not Rushing the ‘Snap Back’ Body After Birth of Baby Noah — Kelly Rowland is celebrating her 40th birthday, a new baby, a new clothing line, and her new music release K, a soul-confirming, five-bop, melanin-popped dance-in-your-house-naked-during-Covid jaunt into fun and discernment. She is poised to talk about this record when her littlest co-worker decided he had something to say. Newborn Noah…

Her new book, ‘Professional Troublemaker: The Fear-Fighter Manual,’ is a guide to embracing your greatness — Luvvie Ajayi Jones is proof of what happens when you pair 18 years of blogging and writing with tenacity and synchronicity. She went from working for the man to being the woman, with a 14,000-member app, her own social network, a popular TED Talk, and now what is sure to…

If only I had brought my wallet with me to the drive-thru — I vacillate on whether to apologize or stand my ground regarding what happened that day, a year ago. Yet what’s done is done and it is what it is. Here’s what happened. I drove to my local Dunkin’ Donuts, ordered a small coffee and a cinnamon raisin bagel. Toasted with…

The star of the Queen of Soul biopic has the perfect advice for women who lead. — For Jennifer Hudson, Respect is not just another movie where she stars as a famous person who sings. For this biopic, she embodies her idol, Aretha Franklin, the Queen of Soul. The film swings through Franklin’s Detroit church roots, her relationship with her father, and, of course, Franklin’s massive song…

Or, how my love of ‘The Sopranos’ led to a Comcastic romance — I left a job I loved because I wanted to find a husband. Well. Kind of. I was loving life in Tampa Bay, living near one of the world’s most beautiful beaches, hanging out with my sorority sisters and the Bucs players they dated. But that was at night and…

Hi everybody, I’ll be honest, when concerns about generative AI first made headlines, all I could think about was Robocop, the ’80s Terminator series, and Minority Report. Those movies are about mixing technology with humanity to create superbeings that, in theory, stop problems before they start. Like all old sci-fi…

A selection of Medium stories you may have missed this week — I was perusing Medium this week for stories about Tina Turner, the iconic American rock and soul legend who recently passed away — age 83 — at her home in Switzerland. And I found a few, like this uplifting piece by William Spivey. There were also several comments to Spivey’s…

When Sivan Hermon, Google’s former director of engineering, was new to her job, a manager suggested she abide by the impact rule: “Focus on driving impact (mapped to team/company goals), do a good job measuring it and then communicating it — and good things will come.” She did that for…

ZORA is a publication by, for and about women of color and our experiences. We are interested in well-researched stories and personal essays about living, loving, spirituality, relationships, pop culture, history, motherhood, daughterhood and analysis of current events. Humor must be labeled as such. Credit and annotations are recommended when…