About Me

Born, raised and educated in Boston, I went to Brookline High School (where my 10th grade English teacher was the first to tell me I would be a published writer; I thought she was nuts!) and Wellesley College (I’m a 1995 graduate), I moved to the Washington, DC metro area in 1997. By the time I moved to Washington, DC, I was an established professional writer and publicist.

My first articles were published in college but my first national piece, "Not in My Backyard" about overcoming community the fear of putting transitional housing programs in residential neighborhoods, which was republished in "Bricks & Roses", the newsletter for the Women's Institute for Housing and Economic Development in Boston where I interned in College. WIHED was also where I had my first successful publicity campaign for an arts show fundraiser I helped plan, execute and publicize. (It helped that my father is one of Boston's most renowned visual artists! I used that network to maximize participation and publicity for the fundraiser.) I would later do a successful campaign for Wellesley College’s Davis Scholar Program 25th anniversary celebration. I was hooked on writing and publicity, fascinated that editors wanted to publish my articles and press releases and people wanted to read them!

Having been talked out of law school by several lawyers I respected, I decided I might actually be able to make a career of this journalism and publicity stuff. (Actually, as the daughter of a celebrated activist artist, I’d been doing PR since I was 10 months old when I appeared in a photo shoot for my father’s college photography class (his classmates wanted to take my picture!) and it continued when I worked, as a teen intern, in my father’s artist-in-residence program, AAMARP, at Northeastern University. I didn’t even know that what I was doing then--and did gratis as a volunteer for years because I was known to be so good at it--was called “public relations” and it was a career until a counselor at Wellesley told me. “You mean somebody would pay me to do this?”, I asked. I stopped doing it gratis after that!)

My post-college, professional journalism career, which began while I was still in Boston as an arts and entertainment writer reviewing authors, lectures, movies, museums, dance and theatre, as well as interviewing celebrities, began to flourish in Washington, DC when, in 1998, my first small business development article went live on AOL.

The piece, "It's the Service After the Sale that Builds Your Business", was an international sensation and was published in other languages. It seemed to spawn a number of derivative pieces. That article was a result of the nascent social media revolution that began on AOL by my answering small business development questions on the sites discussion boards. I simply decided to turn several into articles and request the sites “Business Know How” section run them. They did and the rest is part of my journalism history. Back in 1998, social media played a large part in my success as a journalist and continues to today.

In “DC”, as the locals call it, I also continued my commercial success as a publicist, which began when I increased ticket sales for Bates College (ME) performance artist, William Pope.L, who was appearing at Boston's Mobius on Memorial Day weekend, 1997 by 30% in a three week campaign that got him featured in the Boston Globe's “Sunday’s Best.” Once again, I used the nascent social media movement to publicize the event. I created a viral email campaign, sending any content I could convert to online format to student organizations, alternative media and arts organizations that forwarded the content and posted it on online bulletin boards and discussion groups.

My reputation for being able to use social media to create successful viral e-marketing and publicity campaigns was validated I became the only independent publicist to be named one of the Business Volunteer for the Arts and conducted the 1999 Arts on Foot publicity campaign. In just six weeks, I got the event more publicity than it had ever received in its seven year history with articles appearing in and on about 30 local print, broadcast and online media outlets ranging from local television to Washington Post to AOL. I did several other publicity campaigns, including nationally, that were commercially successful because I “got” social media early on, even though, admittedly, I didn’t know what the phrase meant until fairly recently. But I learned using social media when I posted a question on one of the first LinkedIn groups I joined and got answers that showed me that, like public relations, I’d been using social media to grow my business and reputation since its beginnings.

More recently, I’ve written for Black Enterprise magazine, where I won an award for an investigative cover feature entitled “Downfall of a Black Syndication Kingpin”, blackenterprise.com, for which I wrote numerous personal finance, banking, media business and politcal issue articles and interviewed the renowned and notorious alike for my pieces and WomensWallStreet.com for which I wrote small business and personal finance features. I’m a bona fide, social media using, online content writing fanatic and I’m here to show you how social media works for me to build my newest ventures, bapsodyinblue.com and ecopyandpress.com. I hope you’ll join me on my journey to getting social media savvy!

If you want me to write for you, please visit http://www.ecopyandpress.com to learn more about how this award-winning business journalist can provide outstanding B2B content writing services, A&E and nonprofit publicity campaigns and business journalism to your publication.