Katti Gray tells stories of women who learned to love themselves first — the key to fulfilling relationships with others.

As a prize-winning veteran journalist, Katti has covered hard news and soft: presidential hopefuls; statehouse lawmakers; hometown heroes; time-honored and pop celebrities; floundering schools in Appalachia; New Feminism’s younger adherents; juveniles on death row; the fight for running water on an outlying Mississippi road.

Ms., Vibe, The Crisis, Odyssey Couleur, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, New Orleans Times-Picayune and Toronto Star are among those that have published her work. For 2010’s relaunched Jet, she writes a twice-monthly column. On Essence magazine’s masthead, she’s listed as a contributing writer.

Katti GrayKatti files regularly for news organizations including DailyYonder.com, SHRM.org, TheRoot.com, Diverse: Issues in Higher Education and Newsday in New York, where she previously spent 16 years full time, ultimately as a senior writer on assorted aspects of society, culture and lifestyle, from a post-Hurricane Katrina meditation on home and place to musings about the convergence of religious certainty and spiritual doubt. She was also part of a Pulitzer Prize-winning team at Newsday.

Her articles have run alongside her photojournalism for The Daily Yonder and Diverse. Here & Now, a daily broadcast on National Public Radio, has run her photos on its website.