May 24, 2018

Privacy Policy



We receive, collect and store any information you enter on our website or provide us in any other way. In addition, we collect the Internet protocol (IP) address used to connect your computer to the Internet; login; e-mail address; password; computer and connection information. We may use software tools to measure and collect session information, including page response times, length of visits to certain pages, page interaction information, and methods used to browse away from the page. We also collect personally identifiable information (including name, email, password, communications); comments, feedback, product reviews, recommendations, and personal profile.

When you conduct a transaction on our website, as part of the process, we collect personal information you give us such as your name, address and email address. Your personal information will be used for the specific reasons stated above only.

We collect such Non-personal and Personal Information for the following purposes:

    To provide and operate the Services;
    To provide our Users with ongoing customer assistance and technical support;
    To be able to contact our Visitors and Users with general or personalized service-related notices and promotional messages;
    To create aggregated statistical data and other aggregated and/or inferred Non-personal Information, which we or our business partners may use to provide and improve our respective services;
    To comply with any applicable laws and regulations.

Our company is hosted on the Blogger/Google platform.
Blogger/Google provides us with the online platform that allows us to sell our products and services to you. Your data may be stored through Blogger/Googledata storage, databases and the general Blogger/Google applications. They store your data on secure servers behind a firewall.

We may contact you to notify you to poll your opinions through surveys or questionnaires, to send updates about our company, or as otherwise necessary to contact you to enforce our User Agreement, applicable national laws, and any agreement we may have with you. For these purposes we may contact you via email, telephone, text messages, and postal mail.

If you don’t want us to process your data anymore, please contact us at geoffreyphilp101 at gmail.com  or send us mail to: 1255 NE 200 Terrace, Miami, FL33179

We reserve the right to modify this privacy policy at any time, so please review it frequently. Changes and clarifications will take effect immediately upon their posting on the website. If we make material changes to this policy, we will notify you here that it has been updated, so that you are aware of what information we collect, how we use it, and under what circumstances, if any, we use and/or disclose it.

May 7, 2018

Hola, Negrita!




So I can retire in peace.

At the end of every semester, my students give their own “This I Believe” speech, which was inspired by the NPR series.

I’ve been using my novel, Garvey’s Ghost, as the textbook,  and one of my students confessed during her speech.

I remember complaining to my mom about my skin color one Sunday morning. My two older brothers are both white and I am what you would call “Café con Leche.” I just wanted to look like my mother and brothers. The fact that my brothers used to tease me about being a “Negrita” made me insecure. When we would go grocery shopping they would point at a box of Negrita flan and say, “Look, what is Melody doing on the cover?” When my brothers did that I would cry and cry, until I could not cry anymore.

Now that the semester is over, I asked her to expand on the idea and she wrote this.

Reading Garvey’s Ghost brought all these memories back into the light. Just like Kathryn, I was insecure about my appearance and I needed guidance towards self-discovery. Fortunately, my parents were there to steer me into who I was meant to be, a daughter of God.
Garvey’s Ghost encourages us to think of ourselves as perfect human beings. We need to wake up to the truth that we are beautiful and intelligent people (Philp 215).
I am very grateful that I was exposed to this truth at a young age. I learned to love myself and embrace the caramel skin that God gave me. Garvey’s Ghost is not only about Kathryn finding herself, but about the reader finding out who they are.
Nowadays, I love that the first words that come out of my father’s mouth when he sees me; “Hola Negrita, como estas?”

 I think I've accomplished what I needed to do on Calle Ocho.