The Zuri Reads Initiative

Outside celebrating creativity, Blackness, and forthcoming greatness! ❤️🎊✍🏾📚🎊❤️
Much love to , for ALWAYS, ALWAYS, ALWAYS being our soft place to land! We adore y’all! 😘🙌🏾😘

For literacy, we…
gallivant
jubilate
saunter
vault…

…we show up! 📚🙌🏾🎊

BIG UPS to all the staff at , for your concerted efforts and ex*****on with your intentional literacy programming for Detroit’s youth! THANK YOU for centering their brilliance, wellness, and so much more! 😊❤️✨ We love y’all! 💕

Shout out to , for perfect attendance and for being a reading champion! 📖 Keep shining, Scholar! 🔥

Time is timin’! 🥹❤️☺️

Up thanking God and wishing my favorite human, empath, daughter, and proper noun - , a Happy & Blessed Birthday. 🙌🏾🎉🎂🎊🙌🏾

Today, she’s 11, but still 1 of 1. 📚1️⃣✨1️⃣📚

To my sweet girl, my most beautiful piece of writing -
Thank you for being my living, breathing text. 😘

May we forever write sentences together -
Full of laughter, courage, joy, and love. ❤️

May your paragraphs be rich with purpose.
May your chapters be bold and unapologetic. ✨

And may your story remind the world that you’re a masterpiece in motion. 💃🏾

Keep reading! 📖

Love you girl! 🥰🖤🥰

Be still my heart, The Zuri Reads Initiative! 📚🎊📚So very proud! 🥰👩🏾‍🏫😘

THANK YOU, Boldly Moving Education Ahead - BMEA, for EVERYTHING you’ve done, are doing, and will continue to do so our youth thrive! 🙌🏾🔥👏🏾
We’re looking forward to celebrating all the honorees at this year’s Educators’ Gala. 🎉💚💃🏾

https://www.wearebmea.org/gala

Thank you, DAPCEP, for all you do to support the brilliance and boldness of our youth! 🔥📚♾️🧪🎊👩🏾‍🔬📚🔥

🔗 Register now at: dapcep.org or below

7th Grade- https://dapcep.asapconnected.com/ =325651
8th Grade- https://dapcep.asapconnected.com/ =325656
9th Grade- https://dapcep.asapconnected.com/ =325655

Still in awe from yesterday’s Umoja Debate Team tournament! 📚❤️📚 A HUGE THANK YOU to the organizers, coaches, judges, moderators, families, the University of Detroit, and every single person who poured into our Detroit youth this weekend. 👏🏾❤️🙏🏾
Every room and debate round was filled with brilliance, confidence, and courage. Seeing middle and high schoolers engaging in argumentation and impact calculus remains top tier! 🔥🤌🏾🔥

Over 30 years ago, I walked into my first debate practice with Ashley Smith, Lauren Lewis, and Tiesheko Houston, at Henry Ford High School Alumni Association in Detroit. Our coach, Dr. Stacie L. Tate created a space that would forever shape our voices, our purposes, and our lives! 🤎📚💛

What began with the Detroit Urban Debate League—became more than an extracurricular activity. Debate was (and remains) a site of literacy, resistance, brilliance, and becoming. It taught me how to read the world, how to write myself into it, and how to speak with intention, courage, and clarity. 🎤🤗🎤

With much encouragement from the late Lawrence C. Patrick, Jr., Esq., for nearly 20 years, I have had the profound honor of coaching high school debate—working alongside young people whose intellect, fire, and humanity continue to inspire me. And now, in a full-circle moment, many of those same students are leading the Umoja Debate Team today! 🔥🙌🏾🔥 They are not only continuing the work—they are evolving it, expanding it, and grounding it in community, culture, and collective excellence.

This is what legacy looks like. This is what it means to build and be built. 🖤😍🖤

Thank you to Lisen Hey, Mark Karinen, and Darryl R. Stanbrough, Jr. for all the hours dedicated, money spent, and miles driven and flown to pour into our beloved debate team at Life Skills Center of Metropolitan Detroit. ✈️🌍❤️

And now, my heart expands even more as I watch my 10-year-old daughter, The Zuri Reads Initiative, step into this same space—learning from some of Detroit’s greatest debaters and scholars, unpacking arguments, and carrying forward a tradition rooted in love, justice, and possibility. ♾️❤️♾️

From Henry Ford High School…to the Detroit Urban Debate League…to the Umoja Debate League…to the next generation.

The marathon continues! ✨👏🏾✨

THANK YOU!!! .howard, Darcell Brown_ , Jaida Chanel Morgan_, Hakuna Matata__, Dennis Black, and Wayne State University

Happy 313 Day to our beloved city of Detroit! We experienced all four seasons in a matter of 120 minutes! 😍🥶🌺😎🍂😍

Thank you, Ms. Janet, Source Booksellers, for sharing more of your story with us today…and droppin’ so many gems for us to hold in our hearts! 💕🙌🏾🥰

Feel fee to join us later for a time, indeed! 🎊

THANK YOU to both Dr. Tanya Upthegrove Gregory and Alexandra Sánchez, for their decades-long demonstration of leading, listening, and loving on children, youth, and scholars through our commitment to literacy, Blackness, education, other cultural communities. 🎊📚😊

Whatever type of writing ✍🏾 you’re engaged in, we welcome you virtually pull-up. 🌟 The registration link is below.

https://mymcte.org/event/lajm-writing-jam/

Onward! ❤️🖤💚