“If there was a bottle filled with hope, connection and joy it would be called Naila.” ~ Tiffany Reid, radio host

Naila Francis has interviewed hundreds of artists and entertainers — James Earl Jones, Elizabeth Gilbert, Bobby McFerrin, k.d. lang, Pink — to name a few. Her interviews are different, subjects say, because she delves beyond the pitch, asks the questions that inspire fresh insights and revelations, and she really seems to care. And she does care because she effortlessly connects with people. Besides covering arts and entertainment in the Philadelphia region, she has shared stories from her own life in her popular column Life in LaLa Land. She has won Philadelphia, PA and NJ awards for her work, and her freelance writing has appeared online at Mystic Pop, vensuzine, Sharkpreneur and TheSpiritedWoman.com. “Writing is an intrinsic part of me. I can’t really separate it from who I am,” she says. Naila is an accomplished speaker and Philadelphia personality. She has been a featured presenter at the Philadelphia Writers' Conference alongside Jonathan Mayberry and Solomon Jones. She has been a panelist for the Philadelphia Songwriters Project, a guest emcee for Bloomingdale’s events, and a guest tweeter with Opera Philadelphia. Naila Francis is a warm, vibrant and inspiring woman. She’s a poet, an ordained interfaith minister who performs weddings and baby blessings, and a world traveler whose journeys have taken her, among other destinations, to Tanzania as an orphanage volunteer, Mallorca to study poetry and Peru, where she climbed Machu Picchu Mountain with a shaman as her guide.