Refocused and Renewed: Evolyn Brooks Shares Her Journey from Award-Winning Producer to Breast Cancer to Successful Wellness Expert
by Christy DeBoe Hicks
The bright lights in the studio of a television program she is producing or the soft glow of a candle from her Intention Candle collection: Both are symbols of Evolyn Brooks’ journey to self-discovery and healing. Hers is a story of struggle, success, friendship, and family, with unexpected twists along the way. And she is intentional about using her creative design, production, event management, and social media skills to share that journey with others and to guide them in finding and following their own paths.
An award-winning TV showrunner and executive producer as well as an experiential events producer, Evolyn Brooks is the founder of In My Solitude LA, an online wellbeing platform and community, and Evolyn Brooks Company (EBC), a media company that produces television, digital content, podcasts, and virtual and experiential events. Brooks, who also is a journalist and author, is the creator and host of the podcast Built By a Boss.
Before starting her company, Brooks was a successful producer and content creator for news and entertainment. She has served as a producer on more than a dozen television shows in New York and Los Angeles and has been recognized for her work with several industry honors, including an Emmy Award and an NAACP Image Award. She has also produced reality and competition programs and experiential live and virtual events for media companies, major brands, and corporations.
The transition from a high-pressure, exciting career as a producer in media and entertainment to social entrepreneurship, through which she produces wellness programming and products that help people live more centered and less-stressed lives, was not a sudden one. It was, instead, a life-long journey fueled by the love of books and writing, an impatient ambition to always be at the top of her game and, ultimately, by the desire to own her work. It was a journey that was punctuated by three life-changing events: being a caretaker for her mother, who lost her battle with breast cancer; caring for her father during his four-year battle with prostate cancer; and facing a breast cancer diagnosis of her own.
“For me to have gone through all of these things, part of it is to be able to share what I’ve learned with other people, to make someone else’s journey easier, and to inspire people to do some of these things from the beginning as opposed to when something happens,” says Brooks. “Growth doesn’t always have to be painful. It could be inspired by self-love and care because you want to be your best self.”
Early Steps On A Journey To Success And Wellness
Brooks’ journey began in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where she was born to Robert and Carol Brooks. When she was six months old, her parents moved the family to Cleveland, Ohio, where her father worked as an electrician and her mother was a high school Spanish teacher. Brooks, who has one older sister and a younger brother, grew up in what she describes as an artistic household. Both her parents liked to paint; her uncle, Cecil Brooks, Jr., was a professional jazz drummer. Her mother also sewed and taught Brooks how to sew. “There was art, music, food, and soul all the time,” she says. “But my parents also were engaged in the world, especially concerning politics and education.”
The family was vegetarian, which was not common in her community at that time. Brooks recalls eyeing her classmates’ bologna and cheese sandwiches with envy and loving visits with her extended family back in Pittsburgh, where she could have hamburgers and French fries. Looking back, however, she realized how much she learned as a child about health, food, herbs, and how to be well. Although she is no longer a vegetarian, those early lessons formed a basis for her lifestyle as an adult and the knowledge she shares with others through her businesses.
While her parents guided her according to their priorities for engaging with the world and food, they were also determined to expose her to a wide variety of activities such as dance, theater, piano lessons, summer camps, and golfing camps — all to let her find her passion and talent. But she found that passion much closer to home, in books, especially those by such African American authors as Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurston, and Octavia Butler. Those books, often read under the covers with a flashlight, stirred in Brooks a desire to begin writing, which gave rise to her plans to become a journalist.
Obtaining her college degree was not easy for Brooks. Her parents had ended their marriage and money was tight, so she had to work multiple jobs to pay for her tuition and other expenses at Cleveland State University, where she earned a BA in Communications/Journalism. She was a weekend manager at Kinkos, and an evening receptionist at the International Management Group (IMG), a Cleveland-based international talent agency. With the help of a journalism professor and support from the Dean of the School of Communications, she became the editor of The Vindicator, the university’s student-run, African American-focused newspaper — a job that came with a stipend.
A Career Begins on a Fast Track
Brooks planned to pursue print journalism until she had an internship at WEWS, the ABC affiliate station in Cleveland, and decided she was more interested in broadcast journalism. Her first job out of college was with WKYC, the NBC affiliate station in Cleveland, where she worked on the overnight desk, listening to the police and emergency scanner and compiling information for videographers and producers to prepare stories for the morning broadcast. She knew right away that she wanted to advance from that position as soon as possible, so she would often stay after her shift to observe and eventually work with the videographers. Her coworkers helped her develop an audition tape for reporter jobs, and within six months she was offered a job as a general assignment reporter at WNWO in Toledo, Ohio.
Arriving at the station in 1990, Brooks quickly worked her way up to morning anchor. It was there that she came to understand that the real power to shape what and how stories are told was from behind the camera, rather than in front of it. She desired to have a real impact on people and her community and believed that she could best do that as a producer.
Although Brooks thrived in her news anchor position, she remained committed to the idea of becoming a producer. She eventually convinced her station to let her produce a prime-time special on teen violence — something the station had never done before. Through that experience, she found her sweet spot. After that, her trajectory changed.
She had begun to develop a game-plan for becoming a full-time producer — and then life happened.
Two years after she began working for WNWO, her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer at age 52, and Brooks brought her mother to Toledo so that she could care for her. She was grateful for that time with her mother, even though it was shorter than she had expected it would be, and thankful that her mother had the opportunity to see her success in her job during the last six months of her life.
New York, New York: Making It There
After her mother died in 1992, Brooks decided that life was too short to wait for her dreams to come true. She envisioned herself living in Brooklyn and producing television programs, so she went to her station manager, and requested a leave of absence. With the help of two girlfriends, she packed and stored her belongings and headed out on a girls’ trip to New York City.
She slept on her cousin’s couch in Brooklyn for seven months and worked from 1995 to 1998 as a reporter for two area television stations, WPIX in New York City and WTNH in New Haven, Connecticut, before landing a production job with King World, a production and distribution company. Her first job there was producing promos, but she quickly worked her way up to jobs producing shows.
Brooks has had an exceptional career as a television producer. Her work has included supervising producer for BET Tonight with Ed Gordon, which won an NAACP Image Award in 2002; supervising producer for The Tyra Banks Show, which was nominated for an Emmy Award in 2007; and senior producer for The Queen Latifah Show, which won a Cable Positive Award during her tenure. She was a co-executive producer for BET’s highly rated programs Monica: Still Standing and Frankie and Neffe. She has also produced reality and competition programs, including Shear Genius 2. Brooks continues that production work through EBC. She has developed content with OWN, Telepictures, King World, Lifetime, BRAVO, and the WE network. Along the way, she’s earned plenty of respect.
“Evolyn Brooks is an intelligent and vibrant producer and content creator,
says Franz Caya, executive producer of The BET Experience, who worked with Brooks when she produced both Acoustically Speaking (2018) and The Next Rap Star (2019) for The BET Experience. “I enjoyed working with her in developing and executing new concepts for The BET Experience. She knew how to navigate crises in the heat of the moment with professionalism and care.”
Since early in her life, Brooks had considered herself a “maker.” She expressed her creativity by making things, such as pillows and clothing items. When she moved to New York, she became a part of a community of artists who would make things and sell them at small markets around Brooklyn. Looking back, she sees that the expression of her creative side and working with her hands were part of her journey to her career as a purveyor of wellness. “These two sides of me always coexisted and they still do,” she says.
Brooks worked in New York for a decade, building her career, selling her wares, and enjoying her life until, in 2005, she had the opportunity to go to Los Angeles to be the executive producer for The Tyra Banks Show. She had become interested in trying out life in Los Angeles, so when the opportunity came, she jumped on it.
Life Pivots in L.A.
Brooks hit the ground running when she got to L.A. However, shortly after she arrived — while still adjusting to her new job and new life — she learned that her 82-year-old father had been diagnosed with prostate cancer. So, as she had done with her mother, she moved him to Los Angeles so that she could care for him while he battled the disease for four years. Her brother came to help with their father so that she could balance caring for her father and managing her demanding work schedule.
“It was one of those moments where you just surrender to life,” she says. “We got a chance to connect and heal and be family, and I think that was something that I needed as well.”
The Tyra Banks Show returned to New York in 2007, while Brooks was caring for her father, so she produced reality show projects for several networks, including Bravo and OWN.
When she first arrived in Los Angeles, she found herself searching again for a group that would support her creative side. She found her “tribe” at a place called Unique Market. Once she had a creative outlet, she again was making and selling things on the weekends. Because of the demands of her job and caring for her father, it was difficult for her to continue to spend her weekends selling at markets, so she decided to build a website. She describes building that website as “the hardest thing I’ve ever done.” She had to learn coding, basic website development and design, but once the site was completed, she had an outlet for selling the things she made. While she enjoyed the artistic outlet of making and selling things online, she also liked the independence of owning and growing her business.
It was during that time that she started to focus on the idea of wellness — not just as a concept of health, but as an overall sense of wellbeing, and what that meant. She felt she was in great physical shape, but she realized that what she most needed in her life was balance. “Although I have had a great career, I also needed a sense of being healthy, emotionally stable, and spiritually balanced,” she says.
Brooks came to understand that to find balance in her life, she had to give up some control and let others step up — something she had never seriously considered. She believes that the need to be in control is not only something within her, but also something society reinforces for Black women, particularly with the “strong Black woman” label.
Cranberries Candles And Self Care: A Life Reimagined
Brooks’ evolution toward self-care and wellness became a revolution when, about two years after her father died, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. She was fortunate to be treated by Kristi Funk, a renowned breast cancer surgeon. They found the cancer early, and her doctor told her the lump was the size of a cranberry. Still, Brooks had to go through a year-long period of surgery, radiation, chemotherapy, and recovery.
“Throughout the process, I never said the word ‘cancer’ and asked my doctor not to call it cancer because I felt like I was adding negative energy to a situation that was already out of my control,” says Brooks. “We called it ‘cranberry.’” That term would influence the title of her e-book, Her Name Is Cranberry: How To Befriend Cancer When You Are Fighting For Your Life, the story of her journey back to wellness. During that year of treatment and recovery, Brooks invested in her health and wellbeing through acupuncture, reiki, juicing, and eating a macrobiotic diet, which, she believes, speeded her recovery. She also went through a discovery process about how she wanted to move forward on her wellness path.
Says Brooks, “That period allowed me to think about how I wanted to be, how I wanted to show up for life, what was my purpose, and how did I want to be a vehicle and a vessel for what I had learned. Where did I want to go from here? What else needed healing?”
That road to discovery led Brooks to create In My Solitude LA, a website that featured candles that Brooks created. She did not want to just sell candles, however, she wanted to use them as a way to impart to others what she had learned along her healing and wellness journey after her breast cancer. She created the Journey Candle Collection.
“Instead of looking at what I’d lost, I look at what I still have, what I’ve learned through that process,” she says. She added workshops related to the Journey Candles so she could share how she had healed and encourage others to take a proactive role in their own healing.
“We are responsible for our healing,” she adds. “We may go to a doctor and may have a great surgeon, but we bear responsibility for the process of healing ourselves.”
Shareen King-Carr, who met Brooks when they worked together on The Queen Latifah Show, is impressed with how mindful and passionate Brooks is about her approach to life and wellness. That passion has affected how she and others approach their lives. “She has an immeasurable amount of strength and courage and forces others in her life to tap into their inner strengths, without being pushy or aggressive about it. You want to do your best when you’re around her because she operates in such excellence,” King-Carr notes.
Brooks then began to add more products to her website that support a wellness journey, including a wide variety of candles, candle kits, pillow and linen mists, sleep masks, a free guided yoga experience, information about workshops (currently online), yoga, reiki, and meditation.
Brooks also started to do popup events around Los Angeles where she would set up and sell her products. Among the locations were several West Elm stores around the city. Her business was then transformed when she became an artist-in-residence at West Elm. The franchise built a new store in Santa Monica, California, and gave her space to set up a shop for her In My Solitude LA brand. The West Elm staff helped her decorate it, promote it, and market it.
With the Santa Monica store as a home base, Brooks launched a series of workshops and experiential events. She called those first events Intention Candle Experiences, where patrons learned how to make an “intention candle.” Through the process, she helped participants focus on their goals, create intentions for their lives, and come up with a mantra for who they wanted to be and how they wanted to move through the world. The sessions would end with Brooks leading a meditation with the group and then having yoga teachers and people who did reiki on site for those who wanted to extend the experience. As her business grew, Brooks worked on developing her skills as a wellness practitioner and is now a certified yoga instructor and is certified to do reiki.
A friend and customer, Danielle Stevenson, is a big fan of Brooks and her products. “I have been an avid supporter of her In My Solitude line of products and attended her yoga classes,” she says. “She constantly finds ways to reinvent herself, and any new endeavor she takes on is always rooted in a strong belief and desire of something that she feels passionate about.”
Brooks took her Intention Candle Experience on tour to West Elm stores around the country, which led her to partner with such brands as Bumble BFF, Beautycon, Superdry, Athleta, and MindBody, to produce other experiential live and virtual events. She also began producing events for online platforms, including Facebook and YouTube, and corporations like JBS International, for which she led a corporate-event tour of 28 cities and four countries.
Her most recent venture, the Built by a Boss podcast, features conversations with women entrepreneurs about their strategies, experiences, and trajectories for their businesses and their lives. Topics for the podcast range from business, to work/life balance, to transforming your life. Podcast guests have included Tina Lifford, actress and playwright who stars in Queen Sugar; Mahisha Dellinger, founder and CEO, Curls, Inc.; Tiffany L. Garry-Webb, PhD, MHS, and Associate Professor of Epidemiology at the University of Pittsburg Graduate School of Public Health; and Andrea Fairweather Bailey, founder and CEO Fairweather Faces. The podcast is available on Apple, Spotify, and iHeartRadio.
Brooks believes that everything she has done on her journey has led to this time and this work, but she is not resting on her laurels. She is always following her curiosity about what’s next as she tries to evolve as the industry evolves.
Her most recent project was creating a virtual event for the Afropunk Digital Festival. “The reason I was able to work on that job is that I had done experiential events with brands, so I know how to put an event together. I worked in television, so I know how to put a show together. I have worked in the digital area, so I know how to create content for the web,” says Brooks. “Exploring all those different avenues brought me to this moment. During COVID, while my industry is shut down, I am still able to work because, over the years, I have tried to get experience in different aspects of the industry.”
Brooks has been helping people during the COVID-19 pandemic by using what she has learned on her journey to wellness. She believes that forging connections is critical because the virus has isolated people, so she is creating new virtual classes and workshops and addressing the topic on her podcast. “This is a time when we have to be kind to ourselves and acknowledge that this is something that is largely outside of our control,” she notes. “but it is also an opportunity to pivot, an opportunity to look at what you’re doing in your life that’s no longer useful, an opportunity to make changes.”
It has been a long journey for Evolyn Brooks, as she has rediscovered and redefined herself. For now, her path has become clear and, like her candles, her future is shining bright.
Evolyn Brooks’ Seven Wellness Tips for COVID and Beyond
Several of Brooks’ tips are from the Built By A Boss podcast called “How To Set New Goals And Manage Your Mindset In The Midst Of Uncertainty.”
1. Drink room-temperature lemon water in the morning when you wake up. The warm water stimulates your metabolism and digestion, and the lemon helps loosen toxins in the digestive tract.
2. Wake up early and watch the sunrise as often as possible to create more energy and increase productivity. By learning to live within nature’s rhythms and cycles, we can also lift our mood. Morning light is also helpful in treating seasonal affective disorder (SAD). Researchers also say exposure to morning sunlight helps reset our internal clock so that we sleep better — which also helps us maintain weight and even shed pounds.
3. When we are in a season of loss, as soon as we accept that life is different, opportunities that are meant for us will become visible. When our mind is clear, we can see the openings and also our blind spots. It’s hard to plant the seeds of a new life if we’re constantly pulling up our roots with disparaging words. Pay attention to what you’re thinking so that you don’t sabotage your best efforts.
4. To succeed at a goal, it’s important to learn to trust yourself. Sometimes we don’t start things because we know we won’t finish, or we don’t know how we’ll finish. But none of that matters because the future has always been uncertain, we just have more clear obstacles now. Trust the process of life. If you’re feeling abandoned or left behind, surrender your worries to God, believe in your abilities, and keep going.
5. Decide today to show up for yourself as you do for others in your life. Do something every day to nurture a new dream that may be more suitable for you than before.
6. Stop keeping score on how much stuff you have or have lost, because that’s not what the world will remember about you anyway. In the words of Maya Angelou, “Your legacy is in every life that you touch.”
7. Believe in yourself, your creator, and move AS IF. Eventually, you will create a powerful result that will be based upon perseverance, faith, and betting on yourself.
Evolyn Brooks and the others in the November Wellness issue made musical selections to the Global Communicator November Playlist, which is sequenced by music producer Brennan Williams. To listen, click on YouTube, Apple Music, and Spotify. Enjoy!
Christy DeBoe Hicks is a communications consultant, writer, and editor with more than 30 years of experience working with policy, nonprofit, education, and community organizations, as well as in the music, theater, and publishing fields. After a hiatus, she has returned as a regular contributor to Global Communicator.
