Donna Britt, a PoliticsDaily.com columnist, is an award-winning former Metro columnist for The Washington Post, where she worked for 16 years.

Winner of numerous awards including the American Society of Newspaper Editors, she is currently finishing a memoir, Brothers and Me, for Little, Brown company, which will be published next year. A former writer for USA Today and The Detroit Free Press, she also teaches yoga, offers unheeded advice to her two grown sons, ferries her 13-year-old around and loves her life with her husband, Washington Post editor Kevin Merida, in Silver Spring, Maryland.
 
Britt is inspired by the example of women like her great-grandmother, a domestic worker who as a child warmed her feet by standing where the cows she herded had lain; her mother, who won a high school oratorical contest judged by a young lawyer named Thurgood Marshall, and her grandmother, who took one look at her newborn granddaughter's large head and said, "Oh, this one's going to be smart."