Author
Stacy McDaniels
Stacy McDaniels is a Black woman author and entrepreneur from Durham, North Carolina, who published her debut novel after 50. After more than three decades in telecommunications and more than one layoff, she built her own businesses from the ground up. She is an African American woman who rebuilt her career on her own terms and now publishes stories like her own. My Life Is In A Storage Unit is her debut novel, drawn from real life and told as fiction. Her companion album, Watch Me Rise, is released under the name Marvelous Starr.
For more than three decades, Stacy built a career in telecommunications in Durham, North Carolina. She believed what so many of us were taught: show up, do the work, and the work will take care of you.
Then came more than one layoff. She learned firsthand what it feels like to do everything right and still watch the ground shift overnight, and to face the question of who you are when the title is gone.
Instead of waiting for permission, she built her own businesses from the ground up and founded SLM Legacy Press. After 50, she published her debut novel, My Life Is In A Storage Unit, drawn from real life and told as fiction. Its companion album, Watch Me Rise, is released under the name Marvelous Starr.
- Durham, North Carolina
- Founder, SLM Legacy Press
- Debut novelist
Contact Stacy: stacy@stacymcdaniels.com
A little more about me
- Why did you write this book?
- Because I lived it. I know what it feels like to do everything right and still get that phone call or that text. I wanted to write the book I needed when it happened to me.
- What does the storage unit mean to you?
- It is where your old life waits while you build the new one. Everyone who has ever started over has a storage unit, even if theirs is not made of metal.
- How much of Ava is you?
- Her circumstances are mine, told as fiction. Her voice is the voice I had to grow into: direct, a little wry, and unwilling to quit.
- What do you hope readers take away?
- That starting over is not the end of the story. Sometimes losing everything is the beginning.