In this episode, Kelli and Kendra close out the year with a wide-ranging, grounded conversation about celebration, grief, creativity, and stepping into the next season with intention.

Kendra reflects on turning 50 and hosting a party that became a collective experience of joy, freedom, and Black community. The conversation moves into how the holidays can activate grief and mental health challenges, especially as family roles shift and elders become ancestors.

They talk about vision boards as a serious practice, not a trend, and how intentions show up even when you are not consciously tracking them. The episode also names the tension between rest and ambition, visibility and humility, and why letting your work be seen is not the same as bragging.

As always, Kelli and Kendra reflect on friendship, creativity, and what it means to protect what is sacred while still showing up fully in the world.

Related Links:

1. Kendra’s Birthday party as referenced by Kelli King-Jackson
2. Black Girls Heal Podcast Episode You Don’t Have to Be the Family Savioras referenced by Kelli King-Jackson
3. Annual Clarity Retreat with Dr. Kerry Ann Rockquemore as referenced by Kelli King-Jackson
4. Pattern Beauty as referenced by Kendra Ross
5. Cécred as referenced by Kendra Ross
6. Raphael Saadiq as referenced by Kendra Ross
7. Support the Podcast as referenced by Kendra Ross

Hit our group chat to ask us a question or send us feedback on what you're enjoying about the show!

Kelli King-Jackson is a certified professional coach to Black women leading in white spaces. In addition to coaching, she works with organizations truly committed to justice for Black women by providing philanthropic advising, facilitation, and speaking services. Learn more about Kelli's work here: https://www.iamkelli.com/

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Kelli and Kendra welcome Dr. Tahirah Walker back into the group chat for a conversation about lineage, scholarship, and the ways Black women continue to speak ourselves into a future our foremothers dreamed for us. Together, they explore rhetorical intersectionality— Dr. Walker’s framework for naming the erasure of Black women’s voices and the insistence to reclaim our place in public discourse. They also dig into:

• Education as inheritance
How mothers and grandmothers stretched what they had so their children could study, travel, and imagine bigger lives.

• Work, faith, and belonging
The tension of leading in white institutions while staying rooted in community, calling, and spiritual practice.

• Claiming space in public life
From Phyllis Wheatley to “reclaiming my time,” the episode traces a long history of Black women refusing silence.

• Creative and political life in Pittsburgh
Why so many Black women consider leaving—and what it means to build artistic, academic, and community-rooted lives right where we are.

• The legacy of the Community Engagement doctoral program
How Black women helped shape the program’s character from the very first cohort and how Dr. Walker is carrying that work forward.

The episode closes with gratitude for the thinkers, elders, and artists who shaped our understanding of womanism, Black feminism, and freedom work.

Books & Thinkers Mentioned

• Alice Walker — In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens
• Patricia Hill Collins — Black Feminist Thought
• bell hooks — All About Love
• Assata Shakur — Assata: An Autobiography
• Fannie Lou Hamer — Biography & collected works
• Ella Baker — Biography
• Septima Clark — Ready from Within
• Beverly Guy-Sheftall — Words of Fire
• Brittney Cooper — Eloquent Rage and The Crunk Feminist Collection
• Cole Arthur Riley — Black Liturgies
• EbonyJanice Moore — The Fourth Wave Womanist Manifesto
• Disha Philyaw — The Secret Lives of Church Ladies
• Tressie McMillan Cottom — Thick
• Octavia Butler scholarship (various) — Suggested starting text

Hit our group chat to ask us a question or send us feedback on what you're enjoying about the show!

Kelli King-Jackson is a certified professional coach to Black women leading in white spaces. In addition to coaching, she works with organizations truly committed to justice for Black women by providing philanthropic advising, facilitation, and speaking services. Learn more about Kelli's work here: https://www.iamkelli.com/

Support the show

This week, Kelli King-Jackson and Kendra Ross return to the group chat to talk about the everyday things keeping us grounded as the world keeps shifting. From celebrity parties and “eat the rich” threads to flu and COVID shots, we name how uncertain this season still feels for many of us.

Kendra shares why she’s recommitting to reading after hearing Percival Everett call books—and book clubs—radical practices. We talk about how reading habits changed during the pandemic and how book clubs, even the informal ones, offer community and joy.

Hair care brings a “back to basics” moment with flexi rods, rollers, silk presses, and the simple routines that help us feel like ourselves. We also sit with aging, partnership, solitude, and the ache some women feel when life doesn’t follow old expectations. Across it all, friendship shows up as its own kind of wealth.

Money surfaces throughout the episode—rising costs, budgeting stress, the so-called “Black tax,” and caring for loved ones while managing our own responsibilities. We name the tenderness needed this holiday season as many families make hard choices.

We close with political education: rural suffering, misinformation, and why accessible, community-centered learning still matters. From Books & Breakfast to loving accountability, we explore what “back to basics” might mean for the world we’re trying to build.

1. Percival Everett interview on reading as subversion — referenced by Kendra
2. The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai — referenced by Kendra
3. Bell Hooks quote on solitude & love — referenced by Kendra
4. Black Panther Party’s Breakfast Program — referenced by Kendra
5. Working Families Party — referenced by Kelli
6. Jamaica disaster recovery resource — referenced by Kelli
7. Domestic violence after a weather event — referenced by Kelli
8. Dominican blowout/roller-set traditions — referenced by Kendra
9. Pittsburgh Black Feminist Reading Group — referenced by Kendra
10. COVID & flu vaccine info — referenced by both hosts
11. Dr. Greg Carr’s “different ways of knowing and being” - referenced by Kendra

Hit our group chat to ask us a question or send us feedback on what you're enjoying about the show!

Kelli King-Jackson is a certified professional coach to Black women leading in white spaces. In addition to coaching, she works with organizations truly committed to justice for Black women by providing philanthropic advising, facilitation, and speaking services. Learn more about Kelli's work here: https://www.iamkelli.com/

Support the show