When you leave here today and commence the next stage of your life, you can follow someone else's script, try to make choices that will make other people happy, avoid discomfort, do what is expected, and copy the status quo. Or you can look at all that you have accomplished today and use it as fuel to venture forth and write your own story. If you do, amazing things will take shape.

I'd never really heard of financial abuse, although it makes so much sense when you hear it defined.

I'm here not just as an actress but as a woman, an African-American, a granddaughter of Ellis Island immigrants, a person who could not have afforded college without the help of student loans and as one of millions of volunteers working to re-elect President Obama!

My understanding of Twitter was that it was a bunch of famous people telling you when they're going to the bathroom. And, that was not something I wanted to be part of.

I don't gravitate toward any one designer because I think of fashion as the costume of the everyday woman.

There are so many untold stories when it comes to great women of color.

I grew up in New York, so I fell in love with acting on a stage, not in front of a camera.