A SQUARE PEG / ROUND HOLE CREATION, LLC
presents Angela G. King the scribe...
*Cover design by Shawnda Warren
Inspired by a fourth-grade elementary school teacher, King knew early on that she would make storytelling her life. But it wasn’t until taking a journalism class as a senior in high school that she decided to first cultivate this passion through a career in news. This led the Michigan native to Washington, D.C., where King earned a journalism degree from Howard University before going on to spend nearly 20 years working at some of the nation’s top news outlets.
During that time King wrote for the likes of the New York Daily News, Detroit News, USA Today, Dow Jones News Service, Crain’s Detroit Business and Fairchild Publications. Along the way, she picked up awards from the Associated Press, Gannett Inc., Crain Communications Inc. and Women in Communications for her work. All while also finding time to edit the Amazing Grace newsletter for Detroit mega church, Greater Grace Temple, and to even help launch Presence, a news and lifestyle magazine in Detroit for women of color.
At the New York Daily News, her final full-time journalism stint, King started off as a business writer before becoming an Op-ed editor and, finally, a features writer for the paper's Sunday edition. She also wrote an extensive special section on the education gap between America’s black and white school children for the paper's former sister magazine, U.S. News & World Report.
Heeding a growing conviction to take her storytelling to another level, King left the Daily News in 2001 to begin studying film production at Montclair State University. But she kept her hand in the news game as a part-time reporter at The Montclair Times, one of New Jersey’s largest, most award-winning weekly community newspapers. Here, she garnered more than a dozen writing honors from the New Jersey Press Association, New Jersey Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists, and Garden State Association of Black Journalists.
Having also contributed articles to such national magazines as Black Enterprise, CCM, Today's Child and Upscale, King continued to make her mark as an award-winning writer, penning freelance articles for the likes of the Oakland Press, Huffington Post, and Ambassador, BLAC Detroit and Christianity Today magazines. She garnered a Salute To Excellence Award for specialty magazine reporting from the National Association of Black Journalists two years in a row for the feature stories, "Mother Under Siege," and "Suicide and African Americans: A Secret Epidemic Unveiled," in BLAC Detroit.
But the writing endeavors that King is most passionate about these days include The Detroit Playwrights' Lab, a development group that she co-founded with fellow actress and aspiring dramatist, Charity Clark-Anderson. In July 2017, just one year after its inception, The Lab presented its first-ever staged showcase of its members' writings, including a scene from King's "The Whore of Shomron: A Love Story," to an audience that filled the nearly 200-seat Detroit Repertory Theatre. The summer of 2019 marked yet another exceptional time for King as an emerging playwright. An excerpt from "Shomron," her modern take on an ancient Biblical account in two acts, was selected to be presented at the annual Detroit Heritage Theatre Festival, the BoxFest Detroit slate of staged performances highlighting women directors, and the Detroit Fringe Fest featuring local playwrights and performers. "8:46," a piece stemming from the murder of George Floyd that King co-wrote with Sean Paraventi and Shawntai Brown, was included in the online archive launched by The Breath Project and, ultimately, this national theater collaboration’s 2020 virtual festival. The Purple Rose Theatre Co. commissioned King to write a 10-minute work highlighting the theme “Love Hurts” that saw "Boedie and Carrie," her tribute to her parents’ 55-year marriage, included in a virtual reading of works by emerging local playwrights.
Then there's THE GIRL WHO WASN'T THERE, a forthcoming memoir that King is helping one young West African woman to share of her personal entanglement in human trafficking in contemporary America. Just a girl when she first made her way alone to the United States seeking an education and a better life for her and her family, she instead was beaten, sexually abused and isolated from the outside world for years by the man and wife who took her in. What ensued to finally restore her freedom and bring her abusers to justice was a legal case that played out not only in the media, but ultimately, in the sentencing of this couple in a U.S. federal court.