Delta Soror Felicia D. Henderson: Telling the tale of writing success

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As a little girl growing up in Pasadena, Felicia D. Henderson kept a journal, writing vividly about her eventful life and all the exciting plane trips she took with her seven brothers and sisters.

“It’s not really fair to call them journals,” Henderson said. “I made up half of what was in there. It never happened!”

But it was an early indication of the career path the “40-something” Henderson’s life has taken.

She still makes things up, but now it’s her job.

Henderson’s career as an award-winning television writer has now been honored with the 2010 Distinguished Alumni Award by her alma mater, UCLA.

The creator of “Soul Food: The Series” – television’s longest-running drama starring African Americans – Henderson has racked up writing and producing credits for everything from “Fresh Prince of Bel Air” to, more recently, “Fringe,” “Gossip Girl,” and “Everyone Hates Chris.”

“I’m not supposed to be here,” said Henderson, noting that the typical sitcom writer is “very Ivy League,” and usually male.

“Interestingly, I never thought of writing as a career ever – literally until I was in it,” Henderson said. “But I’m a writer in my soul.”

It’s been a long journey from the little house across from Madison Elementary School where she grew up to the ritzy San Rafael neighborhood where she lives with her father, 93-year-old Edward W. “Smitty” Smith.

She was “very, very sickly child with horrible

asthma” who said she “practically grew up” in the emergency room at Huntington Hospital.

But the fact she couldn’t play outside, and had to stay inside with her mother, may have been the start of an early and life-long love of learning.

“Both my parents were `under-educated,”‘ Henderson said. “But my mother made me a member of the `Dr. Seuss Club,’ and that’s my earliest memory of reading.”

She was about 5.

Her father was “amused” when she read out the made-up adventures in her journal, Henderson said, and she credits him with making her believe she was something special.

“He would say, yes, racism exists, so what are you going to do other than complain? Go and do what you want to do anyway!” she said.

“To this day he thinks I’m the smartest person who ever lived,” she said, laughing.

“I have to apologize to people who come to the house and spend an hour hearing about how amazing I am.”

Henderson, who has 21 nieces and nephews, said she never forgets where she came from, and doesn’t want them to either.

She wants them to know it took years of hard work and education that started with graduation from Pasadena High School, a psycho-biology degree from UCLA, sidetrips through the business world to the working world of television- and movie-writing and production.

Along the way she picked up an MBA from the University of Georgia, an MFA at UCLA – where she teaches screenwriting and is a Ph.D. candidate in cinema and media studies – and a slew of honors and awards.

She has endowed two scholarships, is a member of the Pasadena Alumnae Chapter of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, and the founder of “So What!,” a nonprofit that encourages at-risk teenage girls to stay in school, and which she hopes to introduce at her old high school next year.

She doesn’t hide how much effort it all takes.

“I regularly take my nieces and nephews over there, show them how we lived,” Henderson said. “They think auntie’s life is easy, but they don’t see the four hours’ sleep, or that auntie grew up in a house with two bedrooms and three twin beds. It was all hard work and education.”

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