Farmer Wayne Swanson Jr. is the owner and operator of Swanson Family Farm, LLC and began the agricultural business in 2008. His interest in farming began as a young child witnessing his grandparent’s work on their farm in New Jersey. He would later gain the experience to run and operate a successful farm. Mr. Swanson graduated from Morris Brown College with a bachelor’s degree in Mass Media Arts in 1995. He is a proud member of the Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Inc. In addition, Farmer Wayne is a co-founder of the Georgia Black-Owned Farms Tour – a tour of Black-owned Georgia-based farms and farm-to-table bistros.The Georgia Black-Owned Farms Tour celebrates ownership, and selling, preparing, and eating organic animal and vegetable produce from the land.

The land tells a different story when it’s passed down instead of taken away. For Wayne Swanson Jr., farming is not a trend, it is memory, inheritance, and resistance. From watching his grandparents work the soil in New Jersey to building Swanson Family Farm, LLC from the ground up in 2008, his journey is stitched together with sacrifice, mistakes, hard-earned wisdom, and an unshakable belief that Black farmers deserve not just survival, but ownership, healing, and prosperity. This is a story about mental health under pressure, investing when the odds are stacked against you, its conversations for the future generations that cannot afford to be disconnected from the soil again.

Deni Elliott spent much of her life proving she could do everything on her own, until losing her sight forced her to rethink what independence really means.

In her new book, Catching Sight: How a Guide Dog Helped Me See Myself (co-authored with veteran guide dog instructor Graham Buck), Elliott tells the deeply personal story of learning to trust again, this time with a yellow Labrador named Alberta. What begins as guide dog training becomes a life-changing partnership that reshapes her identity, her confidence, and her understanding of strength.

Catching Sight reveals the extraordinary communication, shared leadership, and emotional courage behind every successful guide-dog team. At its heart, this is a story about love, loss, resilience, and discovering that needing help is not weakness, but wisdom.

Deni Elliott is Project Co-Director of the National Ethics Project, a professor emeritus at the University of South Florida, and a nationally recognized expert in media ethics and disability. But in Catching Sight, her most powerful credential is this: she learned how to let herself be guided and, in doing so, finally learned how to see herself.

Dr. Edmund H. Moore is a Dayton, Ohio based engineer for the federal government, author, and community advocate. A devoted single father, he centers his life around faith, family, and service, remaining actively involved through his church and Parity Inc. In both his professional and personal life, Moore is guided by balance, intention, and impact.

In his book, Financial Freedom: Doing Nothing Is An Option, Dr. Moore challenges the hustle-driven narrative of wealth by showing how financial freedom can be achieved by letting money work for you, not the other way around. Through practical insight and lived experience, he emphasizes passive income, wise investing, and intentional living, proving that building wealth does not have to come at the expense of joy, presence, or quality of life. It comes from doing nothing.