I am the granddaughter of Eula and RP Sirls, sharecroppers in Texas and Alabama in the 1930s, and the great-granddaughter of Rosa (formerly enslaved) and George Thrikill; and the granddaughter of Elizabeth Jean Pratt and Daniel Pratt of Freetown, Sierra Leone. I am the daughter of two parents with doctorate degrees. My father, Theodore Pratt, earned a PhD in Nuclear Physics in the 1960s from Carnegie Mellon and my mother, Mildred Pratt, earned her PhD from University of Pittsburgh. I am committed to helping others actualized their potential through education.
Disclosure: I wanted to use AI to help me write an article on my 10-year anniversary at Virginia Tech. I used Perplexity because I wanted to see how much documentation still exists about the work that has been done for the past ten years. In a time when so much
Disclaimer: This article is not written based on any affiliation with any university. It is interesting to try to dissect an identity when that identity has been so core for almost twenty years. In answering the question, “who are you,” I have often said, “I’m VP and professor at X
Blackwildgirl’s 20 lessons learned about book publishing and marketing Is 2025 the year you write the book you have been dreaming about? Do you have a book that you have written that is about to get published in 2025? I hope these reflections about the lessons I learned about book
