Entrepreneur, underwriter, author
A native of Atlanta, April resides in the city’s historic WestLake/Mozley Park area with her daughter and fur babies. She is humbled and proud to have taken on the task of owning and renovating the nearly eighty-year old home her grandfather built for her grandmother. April is a proud and loud advocate for middle-class African Americans stepping up to the challenges of re- gentrifying historically black communities and proudly becoming the new faces of urban pioneering. To that end, she smiles a little deeper each time she’s questioned about her love of gardening, her desire to raise chickens, her longing for pygmy goats, and how that fits in a community barely two miles from the heart of downtown Atlanta. That’s when she knows she’s not speaking with a generational native; natives know just how well the old communities can sustain an urban farmer.
After more than twenty years in the corporate arena, and over a decade of owning her own business services company, TigerWolf, Inc., April is very proud to be a life and disability underwriter for one of the largest insurance providers in the country. She sees her job as not only a beautiful homage to her love of sociology and statistics, but also a lifelong commitment to social justice and community work as well. Helping small companies provide resources for their employees at critical moments has become its own reward. April looks forward to the very near future when she can return to her alma mater, Agnes Scott College, and finish her Bachelors of Science in Sociology and later pursue her masters. She’s contemplating another bachelors degree in culinary arts, since ultimately plans to run a bed and breakfast in the metro area serving up the dishes her friends, family, and clients regularly request.
While she has been in and out of the local open mic/poetry scene for the past fifteen years, it’s her cookbooks that keep those who know of them requesting a publishing date. Within the next year, April hopes to publish the first in a series of five. She will also be a contributor in a yet untitled anthology spearheaded by the unconquerable Claudia Moss. She is still in a state of shock to be included in such an incredible collaboration with the diverse and inspiring group of women contributing to this compilation.