Katrina Walker is just as much a survivor as she is a go-getter. She’s overcome homelessness, abuse, five marriages, a home invasion that nearly cost her life, and some of the biggest heights of racial tension. But she never let any of it stop her. In fact, she utilized her passion for business and serving communities, as well as her faith in God, to become a self-made a millionaire. Last summer, the US House of Representatives awarded her with Congressional Recognition for Outstanding and Invaluable Service to the Community. This summer, her latest endeavor, a play, Ms. Dee’s Kitchen, will tour 10 cities including New York, Dallas, Fort Worth, Baltimore, DC, and Atlanta.
“When I wrote this thing, I put everything into it,” Walker tells So Booking Cool. “And Ms. Dee, of course, was my mother. She’s no longer with us, she’s in heaven now. But she was everybody’s mama in this small community, and so much went on in her kitchen. From cleaning chitlins…” she adds with a laugh, “If anybody know about stinkin’ chitlins… to the mailman stopping by and everybody looking for their mail, but he’s in there taking a drink.”
Ms. Dee’s Kitchen’s, which Walker describes as a hilarious show, performed to a sold out audience in Memphis, Tennessee. It has elements of Walker’s memoir, Unbreakable: 5 Husbands, Homeless to Self-Made Millionaire – The Katrina Walker Story. The book continues to resonate with people of different age groups. While the memoir is humorous at times, it reveals a lot of in-depth pain of toxic back-to-back marriages, the pain of losing one’s own mother, and almost being blinded and killed during a robbery at her own home. Walker believes the outpouring of support and recognition she’s received from readers of her memoir comes from not writing a “microwavable” book.
“When I get a 20-year-old young woman that tells me ‘I couldn’t put the book down. I need to wash dishes, I need to clean up, but I can’t put the book down,’ and then I have an 87-year-old woman say ‘my hip is hurting but I can’t wait to get up in the bed to read this book because I know I’m going to be laughing all over the place’…the book is doing extremely well. I wrote it so people can understand it and feel it.”
Listen to the interview to learn more about Ms. Dee’s Kitchen, some of the raw experiences she discusses in Unbreakable, the casting, including R&B artist and actor Tony Grant (Tyler Perry’s Love Thy Neighbor), her plans to adapt her story into a television series, her faith in God, and more! For more information, visit Walker’s official website.