About Us

The Tell Me team bring their deep expertise and extensive journalistic, storytelling, and writing experience to you and your story. 

I am a writer, poet, public radio host, Lindy Hopper, and mother of three magnificent beings. My people, sharecroppers, Pullman porters, homemakers, and organizers, hail from Mississippi and Memphis.

A native Chicagoan, I grew up in an era when thousands of Black families were economically and politically inhumed in public housing on the south and west sides of the city. The “State Street Corridor”—30+ straight blocks of impoverished and inhumane projects—remains one of my most acute orientations to white supremacy’s dispossession of Black people. Our collective pursuit of liberation remains my single reason for writing. Asé!

I was born to the grandson of a slave at the zenith of the civil rights era and the end of America’s Golden Industrial Age, and named for an uncle who was likely murdered in a spasm of white supremacist violence. If it is true, as Jay Z once said, that we are who we are before we’re born, then my sole purpose in life is to redeem the community that raised me, to restore its reputation after 400 years of slander, and help build the Beloved community that our Ancestors and our children deserve.

For what it’s worth, I began my journalistic career at the end of the Reagan administration, have worked for the Minneapolis Star Tribune, the Detroit Free Press, the Washington Post, and This American Life, covered Coleman Young, Nelson and Winnie Mandela, Hugo Chavez and Robert Mugabe, eaten cous cous in Cochabamba, braked for elephants in Botswana, and touched the hallowed ground of Cuito Carnavale, the Angolan town where Black Cuban soldiers drove a stake through the heart of apartheid South Africa. I am the author of Flat Broke in the Free Market and the upcoming Class War in America: How the Rich and Powerful Divided the Nation by Asking Are you a Worker or are you White?