Karen Arrington: More than Just a Pretty Face

https://www.travelandleisure.com/travel-news/karen-arrington-interview-black-women-empowerment-trip

Karen Arrington is the founder of the Miss Black USA Pageant. More than a pageant, it’s a movement—celebrating the talents and achievements of today’s Black women and awarding over $450,000 in college scholarships each year. Since founding the pageant in 1986, Arrington has mentored over a thousand young women, helping them get into top medical schools, land major modeling and recording contracts, secure life-changing grants and sponsorship deals, and more. In addition to running the pageant, Arrington is a philanthropist and humanitarian whose work has touched millions of lives. She’s the cofounder of Diabetes Awareness Day in West Africa and was named a goodwill ambassador to the Gambia and to the Republic of Sierra Leone. She has received numerous awards, including leadership awards from the Lifetime Network and Jones New York, the Trailblazer’s Award by Zeta Phi Sorority (the highest award that is bestowed by this sorority, which has over 21,000 members), and Maryland Black Mayors Honors for commitment and dedication to the community, and she was a Woman’s Day magazine Red Dress Honoree along with CNN’s Sanjay Gupta and Olympic gold medalist Dana Vollmer. Arrington has been interviewed in places like the Washington Post, Woman’s Day, Jet, and on BET.

This excerpt is from The Book of Awesome Black Women by Becca Anderson and MJ Fievre, which is available now through Amazon and Mango Media.

AMAL ALAMUDDIN CLOONEY: ADVOCATE FOR INTERNATIONAL JUSTICE

By UK Mission to the UN Ne – https://www.flickr.com/photos/ukun_new_york/32534679873/in/photostream/, CC BY 2.0, Link

Amal was born in Beirut, Lebanon, in 1978; when she was two, the Alamuddin family left Lebanon for Buckinghamshire, England. In 1991 her father returned to Lebanon, while Amal and her three siblings stayed with their mother, a foreign editor of a Pan-Arab newspaper who also founded a PR company. Amal graduated with a degree in jurisprudence from Oxford in 2000, and continued to study law at New York University. While at NYU, she clerked for a semester in the office of Sonia Sotomayor, who was at the time a U.S. Court of Appeals judge for the Second Circuit, long before she rose to become an Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. She went on to pass the bar in 2002 in the U.S. and in 2010 for England and Wales; she went on to a judicial clerkship at the International Court of Justice at The Hague, and continued at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former nation of Yugoslavia and at the Office of the Prosecutor at the UN Special Tribunal for Lebanon. In 2010, Amal returned to Britain to practice in London as a barrister. In 2013, she was appointed to various UN commissions, both as an advisor to Special Envoy Kofi Annan on Syria, and as Counsel to UN human rights rapporteur Ben Emmerson on the 2013 Drone Inquiry into the use of drones in counter-terrorism operations. In the last few years, she has taught at schools including Columbia Law School’s Human Rights Institute, UNC– Chapel Hill, New York’s New School, The Hague Academy of International Law, and the University of London, on interesting subjects such as international criminal law and human rights litigation. Amal is a lawyer for the people and has worked on many cases, including the effort for recognition of the Armenian Genocide of 1915; she cares about speaking for the voiceless and fighting for what is fair. She also co-founded the Clooney Foundation for Justice in 2016 with her husband, actor George Clooney.

This excerpt is from The Book of Awesome Women by Becca Anderson, which is available now through Amazon and Mango Media.