Starting June off, with a new creative, Jade Perry. Jade is the founder of jadetperry.com, and also a Higher Ed professional at DePaul University. Reasons why you should check her out:

• petty flow charts are hilarious, follow @pettyflowcharts on IG and thank me later
• her writing is poignant and hilarious
• she’s a dope Penn State alum like myself *hair flip*                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           Read her interview below!

When did you start your site?
I started JadeTPerry.com in December 2014, as a professional development project! I was doing some contributing writing at the time, while working full time in College student affairs / Higher Education. I quickly realized that while it was wonderful to write for other platforms in different capacity, there was no platform that solely hosted my thoughts or my voice. So, I kept it simple and just started a blog under the title of my name. I knew I was interested in a great deal of things: social justice, faith & spirituality, arts and entertainment, lifestyle. These were the things my life kept coming back to, but the initial posts seemed disjointed and writer’s block was a constant. That changed in January/February when I really started drilling down into the mission of my site, and my personal mission, which is, “to offer information, ideas, & counter-cultural narratives that will empower readers to thrive and to lovingly / creatively challenge secular and sacred systems toward greater levels of inclusion”! This is the umbrella that all of my pieces fall under and I’ve taken it on as a theme.

What topics do you cover?
The specific topics I cover under that general mission are varied. Sometimes, I’m writing about spirituality. Sometimes, I’m writing about womanism & Black feminism. Sometimes, I’m writing about lifestyle and personal truths I think are helpful to share. My favorite topic at the moment is under my “Sheerly Shenanigans” category. That category reminds me to have fun with my writing and that joy is also a form of resistance to systemic oppression, exclusion, and devaluing. So, that’s where I have the most fun!

What inspires you?
Life, in general, inspires me. Documenting what I see, what I’ve learned, what I know as a woman of color is so important to me. Poetry inspires me. Seeing people thrive inspires me. Figuring out what it means to be a spiritual and physical being inspires me. Social justice inspires me. Blackness and our culture across the diaspora inspires me. Good art… meticulous art… thought provoking art inspires me, regardless of genre.

Where did ‘petty flow charts’ originate?
Petty flow charts is a side project that a dear friend of mine and I started working on simply because we thought the concept was hysterical! We thought about all of the silly questions people asked, or the silly things that people did, and how much we have to repress our petty responses (because don’t lie, everybody has a little bit of pettiness inside of them). So, we decided to list those things out and make flowcharts out of them! It’s fun for us and we enjoy making other people laugh as well! Our followers tag us in the most hilarious memes and always come up with really smart and witty requests, so we try to honor that!

What’s your full time job/title?
My full time job is in the field of College Student Affairs, in the Multicultural Student Success areas. At other institutions, I’ve provided diversity education & celebration programming & safe spaces. I’ve also worked in Career Services, looking at sociocultural identity-centered career initiatives. Currently, I’m doing retention and success work with first year students of color, first generation students (first in the family to go to college), and students with financial need. It’s great work and I’m constantly encouraged by the students I work with. In the past few years, I’ve become very interested in how students of color use “spiritual technologies”, as Dr. Tamura Lomax (2016) states, as tools of resistance, resilience, and persistence specifically in college.

What should people take away from your writing?
That depends on the post. Sometimes, it’s just a reflective thought. Sometimes, it’s a call to action. Sometimes, it’s to share art. So, it really depends on the post and how that post fits into the overall mission of the site itself.

What are you currently working on?
This is a season of self work for me. So, I’m working on understanding how all of my areas of either expertise or just interest come together. I’m working on staying consistent in my writing practice. I’m working on getting my speaking calendar together, based on the topics I write about both at Jadetperry.com and elsewhere (contact me through Jadetperry.com for any inquiries).

Where did you go to school?Major?

I did my undergraduate study at Penn State University, where I studied Integrative Arts. This is a major program of studies where you can decide your 4-5 year course chart based on the things you are interested in. So, my concentrations were Theater, Creative Writing, and Communication Arts & Sciences. Those were all respective majors but I knew my interests fell into all of those areas. Now, I have the self awareness to know that at my core I’m an interdisciplinary bridge-builder but then, I just knew I didn’t want to feel limited. I got my M. Ed in College Student Affairs / Higher Education, because I knew that I wanted to work with emerging adults at such a critical point in their lives.

IG: @pettyflowcharts

Facebook: Jade Perry

Website: jadetperry.com