I've always been a firm believer that soul music never dies. The artists we still listen to today, years after their music was first heard are mostly soul artists; Donny Hathaway, Marvin Gaye, Chaka Khan. We still sing along to all of them with our hearts.

A woman is more than the sum of her parts.

African people worldwide are known to be welcoming and open-minded.

When I write a song, I tap into the emotion and the feeling and then I use the emotion to write the words. It's the opposite when I act. I use the words and tap into the emotion.

The highs, the lows, the peaks, the valleys, whatever, it's all going to go into the art, whether I'm singing or acting or whatever.

Everything starts with writing. I heard Nikki Giovanni and was blown away. I just thought 'wow'; she was writing from a black girl's perspective, and the imagery was so vivid that I started doing spoken word.

My mother's a genius. She just kept feeding me art on whatever we had; paper plates, silver platter, didn't matter. You know, she just kept feeding it to me. So we went to see all kinds of theater. We would go to the art museum pretty much every Sunday, and I would watch her. She let me know that art was supposed to touch.