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Thonnia Lee is an award-winning journalist, magazine writer and editor whose work has appeared in several regional and national magazines.

The former newspaper reporter has written about healthcare, the arts, education and African American interests and provided clarity and style to corporate marketing and strategic employee communications. 
Bio

Thonnia Lee began her journalism career while she was still a student at Hampton University. She worked nights as an obituary writer for the Newport News (Va.) Daily Press and attended class during the day. Clear that journalism was the direction she wanted her career to take, she convinced editors to allow her to write feature stories, concert reviews, artist profiles and entertainment advances for the Daily Press before she graduated from Hampton in 1985.
With clips in hand, she accepted a general assignment reporter position with the Fort Wayne (Ind.) News Sentinel. There, she covered the environment, community concerns and was the point person for the first shift for the afternoon daily. The early-morning deadlines often gave her an opportunity to shape breaking news into front-page stories with context and feeling instead of just a police blotter brief.

Ready to develop that experience further, she accepted a position with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 1987. During her six years there as a general assignment reporter, she wrote about a variety of things for the metro and features sections. She was awarded the 1992 Media Award for Print, Educational Articles by the Mental Health Association of Georgia for an article on the affect violence has on children.

She also taught journalism, general reporting and feature writing for three semesters (1988 and 1989) as an adjunct professor at Clark Atlanta University in Atlanta.

In 1993, she decided to expand her magazine freelance work and began writing full-time from her home. She has written for Essence, Black Enterprise, Atlanta Magazine, Upscale, HealthQuest and a number of other newspapers and magazines. She spent four years at Morehouse College, where she became editor of the college magazine, The Alumnus, and managed media relations. Hungry to become a better editor, Lee accepted a position with Delta Air Lines as the editor of its internal magazine distributed to 50,000 employees.

 

The Youngest Victims

Atlanta Journal-Constitution

(May 1992)


Received award from the Georgia Mental Health Association

Casey Brennan thought it was a joke. Last June, a neighborhood teen ended an afternoon basketball game when he fired a .22-caliber pistol between Casey’s sea-blue eyes.

“I was shocked; it looked like a cap gun,” said 14-year-old Casey, now blind in his right eye. Moments before Casey was shot, the gunman put the gun to 12-year-old Beau Brennan’s head and fired. The gun only clicked.

Both boys have had difficulty recovering. Casey withdrew, spending a lot of time in his room. For a while, Beau had nightmares of running through his neighborhood screaming for someone to call 911.

The Brennan brothers are among the increasing number of youngsters who encounter violence and suffer psychologically as a result, said Carl C. Bell, associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Illinois School of Medicine.

They live in suburbs and small towns as well as the inner city. A report from the U.S. Justice Department showed that 22 percent of the nation’s 12-to 18-year-olds have been victimized at some point between 1979 and 1986. In another Justice Department study between 1985 and 1988 (the most recent years for which figures are available), 30 percent of 12-to19-year-olds experienced some form of violence.

The Girls of Summer: A scarcity of fast-pitch softball in Georgia fails to keep them from their field of dreams

Atlanta Journal-Constitution

(July 1992)


Under the lights at DeKalb County's Murphy Candler Park recently, 15-year-old Lorene Olney carefully positioned her bat over home plate. The Sandy Plains Lady Owls, playing in their first fast-pitch softball tournament, cheered her on.

The first pitch, just outside of home plate, hit the catcher's glove with a thud. "Ball!"

"Good eyes! Way to watch, Lorene!" yelled the team of faces pressed against the chain-link fence.

As the next pitch whizzed toward her head, she quickly stepped back. The team, organized last October, took its cue and beat a rhythm on the fence. "She don't want it too high, too high! She don't want it up-in-the-sky!"

The cheer also could describe how out of reach fast-pitch softball is for girls in Georgia.

Pearl Cleage profile

National Black Arts Festival commemorative publication
(Summer 1994)


Pearl Cleage's voice carries you like music. Her sharp, fast words whip through long sentences that twist with inflection. Some words, given special attention, are held like notes, longer, waiting for the rhythm to catch up. Sometimes, waiting for the sting to hit her intended.

"I finally understand how to write a play, what the structure is supposed to be, and the content, in a way that is now organic to what I'm doing, which is exhilaration. But of course, because I love writing and I want to be able to write everything, now that I feel comfortable with plays, of course I want to write a novel because I'm completely terrified by them. It's like, 'OK, you so baaaaad, do that! See can you do that.'"

That voice, soft on the ears, yet confidently piercing, is heard through her plays, essays and newspaper columns, which examine black nationalist themes, women's issues, the complexity of relationships between men and women, violence and community preservation. Through the written word, her plays or her stage readings, Cleage's voice often pushes her audiences to nod in agreement or grit their teeth. But when she's finished, someone has been introduced to a new way of seeing things. Someone has been penetrated by Cleage's voice.

Having Their Say

Atlanta Magazine

(July 2000)


With a six-figure advance on the line, Atlanta writer Valerie Boyd is breathing easier now. Back in 1996, Scribner had given her the biggest payday of her life – and a June 30, 2000, deadline – for a biography of Harlem Renaissance author and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston. A deadline that had once seemed so far away was upon her, and she sought and received a due date reprieve, not uncommon in the world of book publishing. What is uncommon is that Boyd is experiencing the mixture of anxiety and angst that until recently was almost unknown to black female authors in Atlanta.

Boyd, 36, is one of a growing number of local African-American women beginning to strike literary gold. The writers range from Pearl Cleage, whose first novel, What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day, received Oprah’s Book Club blessing, to Phyllis Alesia Perry, who introduced Stigmata at Atlanta’s National Black Arts Festival two years ago, to Nora DeLoach, who added another novel to her “Mama” mystery series just a few weeks ago. These women are stepping into the limelight on a national stage, and in the process, validating and immortalizing the complexity of African-American lives.

A Literary Sojourn

Black Enterprise
magazine
(February 1994)


Fluttering multicolored flags inscribed with the name “Zora!” line both sides of East Kennedy Boulevard in Eatonville, Fla. They are the first welcome signs for those attending the annual Zora Neale Hurston Festival for the Arts and Humanities. For the past five years, during the last week in January, this bedroom community – 10 miles north of downtown Orlando – has been transformed into a retreat for zealots of the late anthropologist, folklorist and writer. Participants gather for a mix of folk talk, laughs, and a chance to take part in workshops and lectures exploring Hurston’s life and works.

“It’s kind of like being in a Zora Neale Hurston universe,” says Phyllis Perry, an Atlanta writer and artist who attends annually. “Most festivals have some kind of itinerary,” adds Perry. “But I feel perfectly comfortable wandering around looking at the places where Zora lived or taught, or talking to people that she knew.” Bold and outspoken, Hurston traveled through the South and the Caribbean, documenting the lifestyles of African-Americans. She collected songs, folk tales, fables, religious rituals and stories during the Harlem Renaissance.

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