Lanette Africa-williams:  

We all knew I was a writer in high school, never mind the fact that I practically lived in the library voluntarily assisting librarians with what little spare time I had. Making a long story very short, I am putting the pieces together to publish my first book of poetry and art (my poetry, some of my art, some of other people's art to represent each poem). Credit is given to the original artist whether it is traditional art, photographic art, or computer graphic art. All of the poetry is my original work. It will probably be published sometime next year. The publisher is already talking about publishing it in other languages. Meanwhile, what have I been doing for the past thirty-three years? Living my life is the simplest answer. Seriously though, I left the area immediately after my eighteenth birthday (five months after graduation) and moved to the DC Metro area for a few years only to return here for five years or so. Then I went back to DC at my grandfather's request. He died six months later. About a six months after that, I moved to North Carolina and married a former Navy guy. The marriage lasted about two and a half years. We had two sons who are now adults still living in North Carolina. We separated halfway through the second pregnancy and I returned to the DC Metro area (in the long run) at that time. To give you an idea of what types of work I have done over the years, I started out at Kelly Services here, went to work for a government contractor in Washington who worked out of the Interstate Commerce Commission, worked at a Deli in the mall near my grandparent's home, returned here and worked at Safeway for two years and McDonald's also during the same time frame (two jobs at once), went to school at ODU long enough to earn 26 semester hours, worked at Steak n Egg/Open House Diner about four times intermittently, went to DC and worked for Aerospace Industries (the trade association) as secretary/receptionist for the Manager of Operations & Personnel, got married, returned to Washington DC during my separation and began a career as a legal secretary (trained intensively by the first law firm). In between direct employment with two law firms in DC, I worked as a repeatedly requested agency temporary for several agencies. About half of the temporary work was at the World Bank consistently for almost two years working in various regions of the Bank. The rest of the temp work wa...Expand for more