My father was a musician for Motown Records. He played bass and guitar, wrote songs, and carried a creative spirit that would define my life. But I lost him when I was eleven, and what came after tested everything he’d given me.
Between ages twelve and eighteen, my mother, my younger siblings, and I became homeless. We slept in cars, in other people’s homes, moving constantly while she struggled with her own crises. My sister, who has cerebral palsy, and her two children depended on survival. So did I. But instead of breaking, I got creative. I picked up odd jobs in housekeeping to help keep us afloat. At the same time, I stayed in honors orchestra, maintained straight A’s, won awards for my poetry and art, and graduated high school two years early. By seventeen, I was taking college courses and had been accepted to Washington University.
But my mother’s emotional and physical abuse had taken its toll. She didn’t see me. She didn’t believe in me. So at eighteen, I made a choice: I left for Florida.
In Florida, I found freedom and a creative partner who matched my energy. We sang in clubs and small venues, covering everyone from Sade to Janet Jackson. I was working on my paralegal degree, learning the law, but music and art were my real education. I wrote original songs. I learned piano. I was nineteen, then twenty, then twenty-two, feeding my soul with creativity while building skills that would serve me for decades.
At twenty-three, I met someone else. For the next five years, he became my partner in business. When he discovered I could design—create flyers, build websites at a time when computers were still a luxury, and few people had the skills e made me CEO of his company. I was young, hungry, and relentless. Using my creativity and vision, I helped build that company into a multimillion-dollar enterprise. I was proving something: that the girl who slept in cars could create empires.
By twenty-eight, I’d also started modeling to build another income stream. That’s how I met a pageant director from Germany who saw something in me. He honored me as Miss Black International, and from 1998 to 2000, I traveled the world, judged pageants, and represented excellence and strength across continents.
From 2000 to 2005, I worked as a marketing administrator and then marketing director for major national companies. I had my own office, real authority, and I brought creativity into corporate strategy. But entrepreneurship was calling. In 2005, I started my own consulting business, Donnchad Corporation, and ran it successfully until 2018.
Then life shifted. I lost my mother and my niece on the same day in 2018. The grief was profound. And then COVID shut the world down. For the first time in decades, I had to stop and sit with what mattered. During that dark period, I cared for a dear friend, Wojtek, who was dying. Before he passed, we created together—he illustrated my first children’s book. That book became *Angelina Honey Bee*, the story inspired by my sister Pat and her resilience.
Wojtek’s passing in November 2018 was another loss. But it permitted me to return to what had saved me as a teenager: creativity. While the world locked down, I wrote. I created. I built the *Angelina Honeybee* series—books that speak to children facing depression, disability, anxiety, and isolation. Every story was born from my own survival, my own journey.
Today, I’m CEO of LaTonea Book Publishing and LaTonea Media Group. I’m a published author, a music producer, a content creator, a strategist, and a business owner. I’ve got thirty years of marketing and design experience, certifications across analytics and advertising, and a paralegal degree that taught me how to think. But more than that, I’ve got a story of resilience that no credential can measure.
My father gave me the creative gene. Homelessness, abuse, and loss gave me the hunger. And I’ve spent my life turning both into something that matters. The *LaTonea Empire* isn’t just about books, music, videos, and business—it’s about proving that creativity isn’t a luxury. It’s a superpower. It’s survival. It’s legacy.