Amena Brown:
Hey everybody. Welcome back to a new episode of HER with Amena Brown. And I have been having Matt here and some guests here, but now it's just us. It's just me and y'all. So thank you wherever you're listening from. And today, the day that this episode releases is considered 404 Day in Atlanta, which is a day that has lots of events and celebrations related to how much so many of us love the city and love the culture here. And so I thought it would be cool in celebration of 404 day to talk about why I love Atlanta and why it has been home to me for so many years. So thank you for joining me in the living room. Let us talk about my home city and why it's amazing. So first question is why did I move to Atlanta? I guess I should also answer and when.
I moved to Atlanta to go to college, I moved here in 1998, y'all. I just can't believe it was that long ago. And when I was applying to college, I'm not sure if I talked about this in detail on the podcast before, but when I was applying to college, Spelman was my number one choice. I had wanted to go to Spelman since I was nine years old. My mom was a nurse in the Army and she introduced me to a pediatrician that she worked with. And my mom would do this type of thing periodically, just if she saw someone that she thought it would be good for me or my sister to know, she would do whatever she could to just expose us to different people, different professions, different things that could potentially be helpful to us in the future.
And so she introduced me to Dr. Stephanie, a friend of hers also, and Dr. Stephanie took me in her office. I remember this part, but I can't remember, and my mom can't remember what it was I talked about when I went in Dr. Stephanie's office. My mom just said at nine years old, I walked out and told my mom that I was going to Spelman. So I've had dreams of going to Spelman for a long time, and to be clear, I was going to junior high and high school in the nineties. So there were a lot of different ways to be encouraged to go to an HBCU and to be encouraged to go to Atlanta to go to an HBCU. So back then there was a magazine called Young Sisters and Brothers Magazine, YSB, and every year the same way that a lot of magazines will do, the top colleges in the nation, YSB would do that, but for historically Black schools.
And so I remember taking the page out of the magazine and putting it up on my wall. I don't know, I'm assuming this is still a teenager thing that teenagers maybe still do this, but back then we were still reading magazines, like physical magazines, so they had posters in them of different artists you love. And I remember looking at that and being like, "Ooh, yeah, I really want to go to Spelman." I want to give a shout-out to my friend Porsha from elementary school. I lived in Silver Spring when I was in elementary school, and my friend Porsha and I, we were best friends and we just dreamed, dreamed, dreamed that we would both end up going to Spelman someday. Even by the time the film Boyz n the Hood came out. When you get to the end of the movie and the central characters that Cuba Gooding Jr. and Neil Long played, it had the epilogue I guess of the story, which basically was that Cuba Gooding Jr's character ended up at Morehouse and Neil Long's character ended up at Spelman.
So it was like I had this moment with Dr. Stephanie and then all these other moments as I got older that were definitely encouraging me, further pushing me on to come to Spelman. And I don't think I had considered as much what it meant to be coming to Atlanta. I was definitely thinking about Spelman, thinking about the Atlanta University Center, which contained at that time, Spelman, Clark Atlanta University, Morehouse College, Morris Brown College plus the Interdenominational Theological Center and Morehouse School of Medicine. So at that time there were technically six schools, all historically Black colleges and universities in the Atlanta University Center. So I thought about just being there for school. I had attended Howard's Homecoming when my mom and I lived in the DC area.
So I really thought about that, but I really didn't think a lot about the city, and I'm going to say something that I would never advise anyone to do, but I did not tour Spelman before attending there. I actually did not do a lot of college tours now that I think about it. I think almost all of the schools I applied to, I had never been there. I applied to Spelman, I applied to Sarah Lawrence College. I applied to Texas A and M and University of Texas, and I applied to Clark Atlanta. I never visited any of those schools. I don't know why. I just don't remember. I just don't remember us doing that. I don't remember why. But anyway, I didn't tour schools. I don't recommend that, but I had my sights set on Spelman. They were the last acceptance letter that I received and it was just like, no contest. I'm going there.
I was a part of a wonderful Black church growing up and I was already coming from a family that was very college forward. My grandma really believed in education for all of her kids, grandkids, great-grands, everybody. So my grandma still to this day is really big on education. So going to college really wasn't like if you go into college, it was when you go to college, you'll decide your major. When you go to college, you'll decide if you're going to pledge. When you go to college. All of it was when you go to college, nothing was like, I had a choice and I'm an oldest kid and a rule follower. So I just went ahead and went that way. I think I visited Atlanta once the year before I went to college because I was a part of the NAACP's ACT-SO competition, which I have talked about on a previous episode here because the NAACP ACT-SO competition played a big role into me really getting into performing my own poetry when I was a high school student.
So I made it to win our local ACT-SO competition in San Antonio where I was going to high school and the National ACT-SO was in Atlanta the year before I went to college. So I got a chance to come to Atlanta. But it's wild, like something happened. I think we actually made it down to the Atlanta University Center, but something happened where we weren't able to actually tour any of the colleges that day. So I actually saw Georgia Tech's campus much more than I saw Spelman's campus and there was nothing that I was going to major in that would've made me in any way attend Georgia Tech. So that's wild. I saw their campus much more than anything. So anyhow, I got into Spelman and moved in August of 1998.
This is a wonderful year for music. Aquemini had just come out, the Miseducation of Lauryn Hill had just come out, so my first semester in Atlanta was full of OutKast music, which was really wonderful. I've been exposed a little bit to OutKast in Texas because I don't personally consider Texas a part of the south, but I do see how Texas has a lot of different layers of culture there. And I do think southern culture is present there in some places. And for those of us who were lovers of hip hop, we were listening to the other hip hop that was coming out of the south that seemed a bit closer to where we lived in Texas culturally than maybe a lot of the East coast hip hop did. So we obviously listened a lot to Master P and what was coming out of No Limit Records and 8Ball and MJG and all of those things.
So all of that was leading to also having a little bit of exposure to the music that was coming out of Atlanta at the time, plus the booty music that was coming out of Florida from Uncle Luke at the time. So this is like the cultural era when I moved to Atlanta. This was two years post the Olympics, which was a big time in Atlanta's cultural history because that was for other people who didn't live here, that was the first time that people really looked at Atlanta as a world city. And historically your watching Atlanta go through a lot of changes in the city to get ready for the Olympics, and you watch the city go through a whole lot of changes after the Olympics had been here. '98 was also, I believe that was the last year of Freaknik as we knew it.
So I was moving to the city when the city was in this interesting flux culturally, but that flux didn't really touch my experiences in the same way as it would have people that had been living here a long time. So I spent my first four years in what was Southwest Atlanta, and back then if you were from Southwest Atlanta or grew up there, they would have this phrase, they would say, I think it was Southwest ATL too strong. I just remember too strong or they would call Southwest Swats, as this phrasing around southwest Atlanta. So I grew up there.
I grew up grew up. I mean in a way, yes, that's probably why it came out. I didn't mean to say grew up, but in a way, yeah, it's like I was an adult, but that time between 18 and 22 is a lot of growing up, is a lot of developmental things and having that experience in the West End being at a historically Black college that has its own, either ways it is perceived to be elite or has ways it can participate in elitism in certain ways and being faced with sort of here we were on this college campus.
I mean, in my first two years of school, I'm reading Frantz Fanon and Beverly Guy-Sheftall and Edwidge Danticat and Pearl Cleage and Nikki Giovanni and Toni Cade Bambara. I am reading deep, deep into not just the cannon of Black history and Black literature, but also reading Black women in so many very specific ways. So you're in this very educationally entrenched environment and then you step a block or two away from campus and you were in the Hood. Even when you drive to Spelman now, the way it was when I moved here, it was very different. Spelman had different areas around it that were still the projects.
So you were readily able to in the same way that I could be on campus and be there with all of these other Black women who were on this same collegiate educational journey that I was on and step two blocks outside of campus and also see my people who were just trying to survive and doing whatever they had to do to make it and to get by.
And so I think that was dissonant in certain regards and it was also very connected in other regards. So I feel like the first four years it's like, I don't know, there were times I got to see Atlanta. I probably will have to do a separate episode since we are beginning National Poetry Month, I'd love to do a separate episode and talk to y'all about my first open mic experiences in the city. But my time in college, I did have some times that I sort of broke away from what I was doing for the most part, which was outside of my schooling, I was involved in campus ministry and I've talked about that some in other episodes here. So because I was involved in campus ministry and very involved in church, that really didn't leave a whole lot of other time for social activities. I wasn't dating anyone.
But the one thing I was escaping away from all of the ministry stuff we were doing as I was going to open mics in the city, I went to open mics on campus, but most of the open mics I went to when I was in college were just grown people open mics. They were not for college students. And I think in a way, me having had that sort of deep dive into what spoken word could sound like and to get to experience that in very Black spaces was such a gift to me. I thought it was a gift then. And all these years later, I still feel that way about it. So I got to experience a little bit of the city that way, but for the most part I was a student and I wasn't dating anybody and I really didn't experience a whole lot of things outside of if they weren't poetry related or ministry related pretty much.
So that was what made me move here to Atlanta. When I graduated from college, which I've talked about this part in previous episodes, I applied to grad school, I applied to Georgia State, I applied to University of Pittsburgh and I applied to NYU to get an MFA in poetry. I was denied to all three schools. So this was one moment that I was in consideration of, okay, I've been in Atlanta for four years, now I'm about to leave. And then I didn't get in, so had to stay. And then around the time I was like 25 or so, I found out about this ministry program. It was a Christian based program where, I don't know better words to use, so I'm going to use this as a word, but I think in a way it was sort of like you could kind of be involved in ministry or missions projects y'all, if that language makes sense.
But you could basically have a year in New York, but you would have to raise fundage for yourself. Is fundage a word, y'all? Did I really... You would have to raise funds for yourself to cover the cost of you living in New York for a year. I think the program had a way that it could somewhat subsidize your housing or help you find housing that would be still safe but less expensive. But still, it's New York and I had this fork in the road right there. Truthfully, I had a fork in the road when I was in high school because Sarah Lawrence was really courting me to go early decision with them. And those of you that aren't familiar with that, I'm thinking this still exists, but it was 20 years ago. So early decision basically meant you were telling a college, if you accept me, I am agreeing that this is the school I'm going to attend and I could not do it.
I couldn't go early decision without knowing if I was going to get into Spelman or not, because I knew if I said yes to Sarah Lawrence that I would be really upset to find out I got into Spelman. So I didn't go early decision Sarah Lawrence and then got wait listed when I did get accepted. So that was my first fork in the road. Is it New York? Is it Atlanta? I chose Atlanta. Well, here I am, 25 with this opportunity to possibly go to New York for a year or I had this corporate job on the table and I decided to stay in Atlanta and still work the corporate job. I had another time, maybe, I don't know, a few years after that where I was considering moving to LA and I had made a lot of connections, just had a lot of relationships out there, and I think I felt over Atlanta because I just felt like I'd been here so long and I was like, I don't have a family. I'm not dating anybody that I feel like I need to consider them.
I think the truth was I just wasn't dating anyone. It wasn't that I wasn't dating someone I had to consider. I just wasn't dating anyone. That's the truth. But anyways, so I was just in that point of my late twenties feeling maybe I should just move to LA, why shouldn't I? And was really about to start transitioning my life there when I already knew my husband, but he wasn't my husband then. He wasn't my boyfriend, he was just my friend. So we actually started dating shortly after I got back from one of my last trips to LA when I was like, "Yeah, I think I'm just going to move there." And then I was like, "Oh my gosh, we're in love. Nevermind." So I stayed in Atlanta.
And I meet people all the time and they say, "Why do you stay in Atlanta?" Especially as a performing artist person, they're like, "Why would you not go to LA, to New York? Because those two places are really the epicenter of entertainment as an industry. Why would you not do that?" Well, for a couple of reasons. I think number one, at all of these junctures, because I've had many junctures with New York and at least one time that I really was considering moving to LA, every time I would consider it, I just thought the timing just didn't seem right for me and the life that I would've had to have been ready to live in LA or New York, I wasn't ready to do. I knew if I moved to New York, because I had quite a few friends that had done this, I knew especially if I was moving there wanting to pursue my career as an artist, that it was just going to be a lot of hustle for me.
It was going to be potentially a lot of roommates and navigating some of those things. And then my family moved here, my mom, my sister, and my grandma, they moved here. I was actually considering moving to New York right before they moved here, and my grandma literally told me she prayed that I wasn't going. And I guess our prayers worked because I didn't go. But I think in part what ended up happening for me career-wise thus far is almost every major opportunity that I've had in my career all arrived to me in some way connected to Atlanta. I had a mentor actually point that out to me several years ago. She was like, "Did you realize that about yourself?" She was like, "Every major opportunity you've had is either because you lived here or because someone who currently lived in Atlanta or used to live in Atlanta, happened to say your name in some meeting, in some room or whatever."
And then of course, as Atlanta has grown as a city to be a place where there is more entertainment industry that's happening here, then there were a lot of things that I was going to go to New York or go to LA for that in some way, those people were actually coming to Atlanta now. So that's part of why I stayed. I think also I just love the air here, and I don't know if that makes any sense or if you all have a city that you currently live or that you've lived in in the past where when you land in the airport, it's like the air just feels like, "Yes, this is home to me." That is how Atlanta feels. And truthfully, as a kid, I moved around a lot, both Matt and I did. We moved around a lot as children. And so for both of us to now be living in the city where we have both lived the longest, it's sort of like I had the reverse.
I grew up with kids whose parents, like one of my best friends, her parents still live in the same house that I would go to to visit her in high school. Her parents probably had the same phone number. I didn't have that experience growing up at all. We moved around a lot because I had two parents in the military at two different times and all those things. So I think for me, it's been a while that I spent all of my childhood traveling a lot. And then once I turned 18, I left home to move to Atlanta. And I have never left since I've lived here. But that's been for a lot of reasons. I think Atlanta, I will say at the time that I was getting my career started, was a place that you could start your business and go through the part of it where you are struggling to build it and get it off the ground, but you could still affordably live in Atlanta back then.
That was a big part of why I stayed. That isn't so much the case now y'all, but it was true back then. This was a place where you could be an artist and maybe you only had to eat ramen a couple of times a week. You didn't have to eat it every day. You could live alone or live with one roommate in a really nice place, or rent a house with a roommate and live in a really nice place while you were figuring out your artist career. And that's one of the things that kept me here. I think the other thing I loved about the artist community here, for me, I think there's a lot of rootedness for me in Atlanta. I think I am a person born and bread in the south and from southern people. So I think there's a lot about the southern sensibilities of Atlanta, the southern storytelling of Atlanta that is very, very akin to me and akin to my family and our roots and things like that.
So I think being an artist here and really having the opportunity to be around and learn from a lot of other southern poets and a lot of other people that were going through their developmental parts of life in the south was very, very, not only influential for me, but I think was very, I guess I should say, was very informative in the sense that it informed a lot of what my voice was going to be and who I was going to become as a writer. And there's a lot of sentimentality about the city. These are the open mic spaces where I really honed my voice as a performer and learned how to write. I feel like learned how to write and learned my voice over and over again. I can think of countless moments and seasons of life as a writer where I had gotten my voice to a certain point and then went back out into Atlanta's poetry scene and found a new voice or rediscovered these other parts of my voice.
I'm actually in a season like that right now, just now that we're not in the lockdown portion of the pandemic and I'm able to go back out to things and be where people are. It's been really cool to take a poem back out to the same open mic that I've been taking poems out to all these years. So I think a part of it is it became a very grounding place for me when I was performing a lot in White Christian conservative spaces. The Atlanta poetry scene is a part of what kept my two feet grounded. Number one, connected to the art of spoken word, and in particular how Black poets approach that and when you're performing at that time, for me, I was performing in these White Christian spaces, but even now in life, even though I'm no longer performing in Christian spaces, corporate spaces can be similar to this, that you can be in a space where people like the idea of spoken word, but they don't really know exactly how it's supposed to sound and they don't have enough experience listening to it to know if it's good.
And the room that I knew if it was good was an open mic in Atlanta. There are poems that I have done in front of White audiences that those White audiences were really impressed by, but I learned that the poems weren't actually that dope when I took them into a Black poetry space, which again is good for you as a poet because especially in the world I was in then, it was just performing poetry in White Christian spaces it's just a wild time because you are in front of some very large audiences with amazing lighting, amazing cameras, all these things, and you can get used to it.
And if you don't watch yourself, you will believe your own press in a way, and coming home and being able to take those poems out and try them in some of those spaces. Or sometimes I think for me, getting home and realizing like, oh shit, I'm writing a lot of things that work for those conferences, but I have ceased to write about me and write about my own stories and my own experiences, my own family, my ancestors, my breakup experiences, my falling in love experiences. So I think in that way, the Atlanta poetry scene has always been such a grounding and inspiring place for me as a writer and as a performer.
What are a few of my favorite things about living here? I love that really good fried chicken is available every day of the week. And I realize maybe there are some other cities that's true of, but not all of them, not all of them. Not all major cities can say that. I could any day of the week be like, I really want some fried chicken and get excellent fried chicken. I don't have to wait for a really such and such restaurant to be open. Any day of the week. I wanted great fried chicken, there's a place to go and do that. I love that about Atlanta. I love the weather here. I realized that after I finally accepted that I probably will never be a girl who lives in New York full-time. Part of that is just the winter.
I have lived in Texas and the south most of my life, and I like about Atlanta that it does have seasons, but most of the weather here is pretty temperate. But you can tell right now, we are just at the point where now it's getting to be spring, which in some other places would start to feel like summer because it gets pretty warm here pretty quickly. But yeah, you get all four seasons here, but you're not getting a lot of snow. And if you get snow or ice, this whole place is shutting down and everything out of the grocery stores will be gone within 48 hours. Get out of here. So I think that's one thing that I love about Atlanta. I really love the artistic community here. The artistic community here has been really good to me and good for me.
I feel like we are very giving towards each other. It's like I've had people refer me for gigs, I've referred other people for gigs. I've had people who ended up in a situation where they had budgets or whatever where they could book artists and they booked me and I totally do the same thing. So I would say the artistic scene for me and my experience has been a very communal place. It's a place where people are looking out for you, do want the best for you. Everything in the artistic scene here is not about competition, and I like that 'cause I know that isn't true of all cities artistic scenes. I loved especially a particular era of it for me, this may still be true, but there was a particular era of time for me here where the artistic scenes connected. So I was on the poetry scene, but then I also had some friends who were musicians and singers, and so we would go and support them in their shows.
We would sometimes collaborate on pieces and shows and events and things. And so I loved all of the Venn diagram of the different artistic communities. You might have some Black artists that are in the visual arts side of it, and then they might also have some friends who are poets who also have friends who are musicians. And before you know it, there's just this cross collaborative conversation that I've always loved about the scene here. I'm not going to lie, my family's here now. That's definitely a part of what made Atlanta home to me. My mom, my grandma and my sister moved here when I was about 24, 25. So a couple of years after I'd graduated from college, they moved here and my sister actually completed her whole high school and college years in Atlanta. So that made a difference too because I don't know, I'm not sure if it would've felt like home as much if my mom and my sister and my grandma had still been in Texas and I was always going home. That in a certain way for me, it's like wherever my mom is that's home.
And once my mom moved here to Atlanta, it was like Atlanta already felt like home to me. But now that my mom was here, that really felt like, okay, now this is home because I don't have to travel to go home to her. Now we've all made our home here. And then once I got married, my husband's family, all of his immediate family are in the state of Georgia. Everybody's within driving distance from each other. So that also makes a difference too. And I never would've thought that I would've defined home based on living close to my family, especially not when you're in your teenage years. And there were certain parts of my twenties where I just felt very, I need to define and be very different from what the family's doing. So these are the things I do with my friends and these are the things I do with my family.
I've felt very critical about having those types of delineations. But now I'm like, "Oh my gosh, I love that I live close to my family." When my mom lived in Texas, we really had maybe two holidays a year where we saw each other. Whereas now it's like I get to see my mom Mother's Day, on her birthday, on my grandma's birthday. So I think that also is a thing that doesn't have anything to do with the city of Atlanta, but is one of my favorite things about living here. I love the music scene here. I don't make music myself, but I come from a long line of musicians, so I really love music. Music informs a lot of my creative work. So I love just even the Indie music scene here. This is not the artists who are traveling nationally and bring their tours to Atlanta, just the independent artists that you could go into local venues here and hear them play music.
I loved our music scene. I love the music heritage that's been here and in particular the Black music heritage that's been here in Atlanta. So I love that. I love that I can get a chance to hear some different artists and hear people that I love and know. And I could go someplace and hear an artist I never heard before in my life and be like, "Wow, that person's amazing. They live right here in Atlanta. That's wild." I love that.
Last question is what I hope for Atlanta's future and Atlanta as a city is in a really interesting time. I think there are quite a few major cities in America that are going through this kind of change. Atlanta has been a very Black city for a very long time. I would say there's still a lot of Black folks here. For a lot of Black people, this is one of the first cities in America they've been to where they see Black people experiencing financial wealth, where they see Black people being upwardly mobile.
And I remember when we were driving here, my mom and I driving here, for me to move onto Spelman's campus and just even being on the highway and looking over and seeing Black people driving Benzes and Beamers and stuff like that, it was just so rare to see that where I was from in San Antonio. And a lot of people have said that to me when they move here, it's just rare to see Black people living in these big old houses and stuff down here. All of that made a lot of Black folks feel hopeful for their future and for what success could be. I think now that I've lived here a long time, Atlanta has tensions like any city does. Atlanta is going through a very large period of gentrification right now, and that is affecting the people in our community that are most vulnerable, that are most economically vulnerable, and that also affects the culture of the place.
There are a lot of places that were center for Atlanta culture when I moved here that were priced out of the area. So those spots where all of the poets would gather aren't there anymore because there are condos there now or because there's a CBD store there now or whatever it is. So I do experience those feelings having lived here over 20 years and being like, damn, there are a lot of places that really make Atlanta, Atlanta. And I think that the difficulty with gentrification is that sometimes in how the cities get planned and how the real estate gets built, it starts to make all the cities, all the major cities look the same, versus you being able to get somewhere and be like, "Oh, this is Atlanta." You could look at the houses there, you could look at the architecture, you could look at so many things and go, "This is Atlanta."
And there are parts of Atlanta that are just starting to feel bland. Could be any city. And I hate that for us. And I think there are a lot of people, and I hope to be a part of this too, just doing everything we can to preserve what some of us will call the old Atlanta narrative. And in Atlanta, there is this interesting dynamic between the people who are considered old Atlanta, which is people who've been born and raised here, people who have lived here for generations, very specifically Black folks that have lived here for generations. And then there are the new Atlanta folks who moved here a few years ago or moved here 10 years ago. I would probably be considered new Atlanta in some ways too, because I didn't grow up here, I didn't go to high school here and wasn't born and raised here. My people aren't from here.
But what tends to happen is people move to a new place, they move to a new city, and sometimes the newish people that move there begin to define what those neighborhoods can be called or what that side of town should be referred to as now. And all of this rebrand and everything. And in a sense, the narratives of the people who were already here doing amazing work, the people who were already here making so many creative things happen, their narratives get lost.
So this is one of the reasons why I was interested to become the Chapter Host of Creative Mornings Atlanta, because it would give me the opportunity to share narrative, share more narrative with folks, and give more of an opportunity there where you don't have to act like Atlanta just hopped up and invented itself five years ago or 10 years ago. That Atlanta's been here, that the Black folks who were here and helped build this city were here even also needing to acknowledge, which is very interesting when you get into the history of how the city of Atlanta was built, that this land was originally the land of the Muskogee Nation, land of the Cherokee nation, and also gaining that history because they were forced off of the land where their people had resided for centuries.
So it's interesting when we consider the places that we live or that we have lived, that we love, and every place that we call home, whether it's our original home with our families of origin or the cities where we grew up, all of the places we call home have complicated histories. And I guess for me right now, it's about doing everything I can to tell the story of home accurately and to honor all of the peoples who call this place home. And for me also to give back to Atlanta's artistic and creative community because it has given so much to me. So however I can do that by participating in arts that are happening here, by supporting our local artists, by using their music whenever I can. If somebody's asking me about artists I want to suggest for something, nine times out of 10, I'm going to say an artist from here, because that's how we do.
So I love Atlanta. I don't really see myself moving. There's a couple of cities in America like New York, like LA especially now with some of the work I'm doing, a lot of the projects that I'm working on, almost all of the projects that I'm working on that are not my own projects, books, podcasts, things like that, are all related to either companies or people that are in LA right now. So I'm not opposed to if a project came up and I need to be in LA for six months, you need to be in New York for six months. I wouldn't be opposed to that. I would do that, but I would still be like, "When this is over, I'm going back to Atlanta."
I don't know, it's just home to me now. So anyways, I will love Atlanta forever. That's just the truth. So shout out to Atlanta and for my old school ATL people, I will end this episode with a call that people who've lived in Atlanta a long time used to say, if you were in a crowd, in an audience, somebody brought up somebody from Atlanta, you would yell out, "ATL, hoe." So that's how I'm going to close the episode. I love Atlanta. If y'all haven't been here, I hope you'll get a chance to visit too. And even if it's not Atlanta for you, whatever that city is that you forever love, I hope that you will find ways to give back to it in the ways that it's given good things to you. See y'all next week.
HER with Amina Brown is produced by Matt Owen for Sol Graffiti Productions as a part of the Seneca Women Podcast network in partnership with iHeartRadio. Thanks for listening and don't forget to subscribe, rate and review the podcast.