We grew up in abject poverty. Acting, writing scripts and skits were a way of escaping our environment at a very young age.

Let me tell you something: The only thing that separates women of color from anyone else is opportunity. You cannot win an Emmy for roles that are simply not there.

There's not one woman in America who does not care about her hair, but we give it way too much value. We deprive ourselves of things, we use it to destroy each other, we'll look at a child and judge a mother and her sense of motherhood by the way the child's hair looks. I am not going to traumatize my child about her hair. I want her to love her hair.

But along with all of that it was, "Oh, isn't he a great storyteller? Oh, it's that why I married him? Isn't he handsome? Oh, what am I going to make for dinner today?" I put all of that as a part of [Roses's from "Fences"] inner everyday monologue so, by the time he tells he that news and all of that I feel that it's there already.

It feels really good to embrace exactly who I am and be my sexy, to be my sexualized, to be my woman.

When your passion and drive are bigger than your fears, you just dive.

My husband [Julius Tennon] and I started a production company. We've already optioned a book and some scripts to do exactly that, to create more complicated, multi-faceted roles for African-Americans, especially African-American females. I think it's important.