Growing up, I watched my single mother work hard to provide for her three kids. She raised us in a one-bathroom house on a public-school teacher's salary of $22,000 a year.

There is a disconnect between Arkansas and Washington, D.C. The career politicians in Washington are not listening to people here in Arkansas, and this is the fundamental problem with politics.

Arkansas families need to feel safe in their homes and communities, which is why we need a U.S. Senator who will address threats - both at home and abroad - head on.

Arkansas needs leaders who will stand up to anyone in Washington, from either political party, and do what's right for Arkansas and for our country.

In L.A., I was meeting people who were all actors. My mind started to open up to what acting was. I didn't realize that Brad Pitt was a real person. I didn't think he was a robot or a machine, but I thought you were just born into acting - that it's a family tree, kind of like NASCAR. No one can just say, 'Hey, I'm going to be a NASCAR driver.'

There aren't a lot of ironclad rules of family life, but here's one: No matter how much your parents deny it - and here's betting they deny it a lot - they have a favorite child. And if you're a parent, so do you.

My mother is Afro-Caribbean and my father is Caucasian-American, and I was born in Pennsylvania and moved to the Cayman Islands when I was about 2. So I grew up there with my mother, and it's really all I know. I grew up there until it was time to go to college, and that's when I moved back to America.

No one in my family was a reader of literary fiction. So, I didn't have encouragement, but I didn't have discouragement, because I don't think anybody knew what that meant.