On Sunday, November 16, 2025, Great Day Latte hosted a very potent Coffee & Conversation Book Signing and Listening Party of best selling author Erica Perkins and Joshua Jones, the Executive Director of HALO (Healing and Life Opportunities). The event was a masterpiece of literature success of the author and direct community response with national resilience and local recovery as the key themes.
The intimate event, held at 10 S. Conception St. provided participants with an open environment in which they could discuss the resilience concept in everyday life. This discussion focused on the theme, ‘’Trauma to Triumph” which is a central component in the essay by Perkins in The HBCU Experience. It has a special connection in the context of the Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU).
The event’s significance lay in its direct relationship between the work of Erica Perkins and the critical need of the Mobile community. Perkins’s participation highlights the national significance of writing the HBCU narrative, an agenda advanced by opinion leaders like Ashley Little. The book has become a part of a larger project to record the strong, usually unspoken stories of resilience among HBCU alumni.
The “Candid Coffee” segment featuring Joshua Jones brought this national theme home. Jones, as the head of HALO and the initiator of CEASE 2 EXIST, provided real-life background on the process of providing real-life healing.
The reflective and focused atmosphere at the Great Day Latte gave guests literary motivation and practical knowledge of local healing and support programs. This experience showed that Mobile is an active participant in community resilience.