All month long we honor women road openers in the land of music. To talk about women's history is to also talk about music history. It's time to get lost in the deeps cuts of sound magicians, spirited lyricists, and singing pioneers. Let them not be forgotten.

This week, we honor a song MC Lyte wrote when she was twelve, I Cram To Understand U (Sam)

I hear Lyte deliver her first line, I used to be in love. Instantly, I know what to expect. Love and heartbreak are universal experiences above all else. What follows line one is the story of a relationship's demise and, it might be a story I relate to.

-Miss Penny

All month long we honor women road openers in the land of music. To talk about women's history is to also talk about music history. It's time to get lost in the deeps cuts of sound magicians, spirited lyricists, and singing pioneers. Let them not be forgotten.

This week, we honor Odetta.

As for Storm, there’s plenty to work with in terms of narrative arc: daughter of African royalty, orphaned traumatically as a child, apprenticed to a master pickpocket, worshipped as a goddess, recruited to the X-Men, rising to a leadership position within the X-Men, and let’s not forget that whole superstar superhero marriage thing. And go! There is source material penned by none other than bestselling African American novelist Eric Jerome Dickey; in fact, his mini-series has been described as Ororo’s origins story. 

Storm’s badassery makes her one of the most popular X-Men and superheroes. Period.  And we haven’t seen the full range of her awesomeness on screen yet - her regal bearing, her sense of authority, her complexity, her sexiness, her power; all of it. She’s a fighter, a leader, and did I mention she controls the weather? As a Caribbean girl, in the path of hurricanes, and vulnerable to earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanoes, flash flooding, and all kinds of unpredictability, I have much respect for the weather…and she who controls the weather.

Do you ever feel your body is guided while painting?

When I paint it's really sporadic but I feel like when it happens I’m focused, I’m like ‘okay I’m doing this,’ I’m focused. My mind is kind of at ease, my spirit is kind of at ease because I’m just focusing on seeing where this (artwork) is going to move or change to, what colors I’m going to move toward. It’s almost like my guards are let go. And that sporadic-ness is okay at that time. Even just going through magazines and cutting out shapes and stuff, that does offer me some solace but it looks crazy, if someone saw me in my room cutting up magazines and shapes and just cutting things out…(laughs) I think I kind of act manically, but creatively, it’s fine.