My work: I reed adz ahl dey at ann advurtizeeng aginsee.

My hometown: Born in the Sun Belt (Inglewood, CA). Raised in the Bible Belt (Winston-Salem, NC).

I’m thinking about: Countertops, backsplashes and faucets, oh my.

I am most proud of: Being the first single woman in my family to become a homeowner.

Veteran news anchor and reporter for WXII 12, Cameron Kent is no stranger to storytelling. He’s written screenplays for NBC, HBO, Lifetime and the American Film Institute, as well as two crime/thriller/suspense novels. But on this, the debut of his third novel, The Road to Devotion, Cameron has taken a leap: into historical fiction and his feminine side. “They always say write what you know, and writing about two women during the Civil War is nothing I know anything about. It was a radical departure but I just felt like it was the best way to tell this story.” And the story is this: two women, Sarah, a landowner, and Jacquerie, a runaway slave from Louisiana, develop an abiding friendship and cause Sarah to challenge a lifetime of spoon-fed ethics. “This book has been different because everything [else] I’ve ever written has been to entertain, and I wanted to say something, I wanted to express something about my world view.”

What you like about reading skirt!?: “I have a copy of skirt! in my car right now. It’s been good to read and get a woman’s perspective on the world.”

It’s early January and freezing as I start this love letter. To get my heart in the right place, I’m channeling the warm stories of the couples we interviewed. I’m listening to Sex on Fire by the Kings of Leon. I’m doodling heart over heart over heart while my own heart falls head over heels and rises again. But my fingers are cold. So are my feet. And I don’t think I’ll ever get over the disconnect, of trying to determine and relate to you what I’ll be thinking three weeks from now and not what I’m thinking right now. If I were honest with you, I’d tell you that I’m not really thinking of love, the entity, right now at all but the mysterious mechanics of love and how it finds us in the most unlikely places, how it can come up, as poet Alice Walker says, “…through cracks in the conversation / through silences in the dark / through everything you thought was concrete.” But what fun is honesty, anyway? Not much. So, let’s try this again. “It’s early January and there’s fire in my heart as I start this love letter…”