Getting to Know NAACP 2015 Image Award Nominee and Entrepreneur Gwen Richardson

Gwen Richardson is an author, publicist and entrepreneur.  As an author, she has five published books, four non-fiction and one fiction.  101 Scholarship Applications: What It Takes to Obtain a Debt-Free College Education was nominated for a 2015 NAACP Image Award.

As an entrepreneur, Gwen is co-founder of Cushcity.com, the world’s largest African-American Internet retailer with over 20,000 products online.  Gwen and her husband, Willie, established Cushcity.com in 1998. The web site receives more than 1 million hits per month and has thousands of customers in all 50 states and internationally.  She has been an entrepreneur for more than 20 years.

Prior to establishing Cushcity, she and Willie published a national public affairs magazine, Headway, and she served as the publication’s editor. She was a monthly columnist for USA Today from 1996 to 1999, and her commentaries have also been published in the above-referenced daily newspapers, as well as the Detroit Free Press, Dallas Morning News and the Amarillo Globe-Times.  She has also been published in Editor & Publisher, Investor's Business Daily and Emergemagazine (which published in the 1990s).

In addition, Gwen is co-founder and national coordinator of the National Black Book Festival.  This annual event, held in Houston, Texas, attracts over 100 African-American authors from across the U.S. and is the largest indoor gathering of Black authors in the world