Angela Shelf Medearis, star of the TV show The Kitchen Diva! and author award-winning children's books and cookbooks, will speak on Thursday, Feb. 28 at 11 a.m. at San Antonio College in the Loftin Student Center, second floor.  Her topic will be How and Why I Write.

This event is free and open to the public and is a part of the college's Black History Month celebration.  Students who have won the Black History Month Essay Competition will be awarded scholarships at this event.

Medearis has written more than 80 children's books and several cookbooks for adults, including The African American Kitchen, The Kwanzaa Celebration, Ideas for Entertaining from the African-American Kitchen, and her newest book The Ethnic Vegetarian, published by Rodale Press.  Many of her children's books have won awards, including Seven Spools of Thread, which won multiple awards and was featured on The Today Show.  More than 10 million copies of her books have been sold world-wide.

She is also one of the only African-American women in the U.S. to own a multi-media company, Diva Productions, Inc., that produces books, educational radio, television, film and animation projects. These include a television series that began airing on PBS last year ‹ The Kitchen Diva!  On this program, Medearis shows viewers how to use local, farm-fresh ingredients to prepare healthy, ethnic influenced dishes.  New York Times food writer J. M. Hirsch described Medearis' cookbook The Ethnic Vegetarian as "crunchy and spicy on the outside, tender on the inside."

For more information, go to www.divapro.com <http://www.divapro.com>  or call Janice Clayton at 210-733-2512.