Family is very important to me. People often ask me how I managed to stay grounded and sane, having started as a child star and growing up in the industry, and really, it's God. But it's also my family and God in my family.

God-willing and prayerfully, we are always growing and changing and developing personally and professionally.

I really enjoy theater. Performing live onstage is helping me to grow as an actress.

I'm not just considered a former child star. I'm not considered a black actress. I'm not considered an actress. I've done roles that were written for men. First and foremost is God: I definitely believe in Him having kind of mapped out what my destiny was going to be.

My mother was very fashion-oriented, and she started a little children's wear business that became large in this little town. She used to be able to look at a picture of an outfit and just start cutting the fabric right there.

I grew up hunting and fishing. I've always been into archery. I've always been into cars... In my family, that was just stuff we did. That's just the way it was.

My grandmother was the matriarch. If you didn't have a place to stay, if you needed food, if you were just coming out of jail or rehab, you went to her. Watching her in our family and our wider community was what inspired me and still does.

Child labor and poverty are inevitably bound together and if you continue to use the labor of children as the treatment for the social disease of poverty, you will have both poverty and child labor to the end of time.