Regina Louise | |
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Born | |
Occupation | Author |
Known for | Transforming Trauma Into Potential |
Regina Louise Kerr-Taylor [1] is an American author, child advocate, and motivational speaker, who is best known for successfully navigating through more than thirty foster home placements as a ward of the California Juvenile Court system. Louise is the second child of the late singer/songwriter Tom Brock. Brock abandoned his daughter into the foster care system during the late-1970s to pursue musical interests.
Regina Louise was born May 2, 1963, in Austin, TX. [2] She attended Molly Dawson elementary school and left at the age of eleven. Due to her father's estrangement, Regina turned herself in to the Richmond Police Department and was taken into custody the day before her thirteenth birthday. Louise bonded with Jeanne Kerr, who worked as a nurse at the shelter. Kerr expressed a willingness to adopt Louise, but a Contra Costa County court denied her petition. [1]
Louise lived in over 30 foster homes, group homes and psychiatric facilities before age 18. She now speaks and coaches organizations and individuals on issues of trauma and personal development, and is a foster care abolitionist. She currently resides in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Author of the memoir Somebody's Someone, Louise has appeared on National Public Radio's All Things Considered [3] KQED Forum, CBC, BBC and the CBS Early Show. Louise and her story have also been covered in various newspapers and magazines. [4] [5] [6] After the 2003 release of Somebody's Someone, Louise was able to reconnect with Kerr, now married to a man with the last name Taylor. On Nov. 20, 2003, in the same Contra Costa County courthouse where a judge had denied Kerr's request to adopt Louise decades ago, Kerr, then 59, adopted Louise, then 41, who then made Kerr-Taylor her legal last name. [1] Her second memoir, Someone Has Led This Child to Believe: A Case History of Love, was released July 10, 2018. [7]
On April 20, 2019, Lifetime released I Am Somebody's Child: The Regina Louise Story. [8] The film stars Angela Fairley as Regina Louise, Ginnifer Goodwin as Jeanne Kerr, Monique Coleman as Ms. Lewis, Sherri Saum as an adult Regina Louise, and Kim Hawthorne as Gwen Ford.
Contra Costa County is a county located in the U.S. state of California, in the East Bay of the San Francisco Bay Area. As of the 2020 United States Census, the population was 1,165,927. The county seat is Martinez. It occupies the northern portion of the East Bay region of the San Francisco Bay Area and is primarily suburban. The county's name refers to its position on the other side of the bay from San Francisco. Contra Costa County is included in the San Francisco–Oakland–Berkeley, CA Metropolitan Statistical Area.
Antioch is the third-most populous city in Contra Costa County, California, United States. The city is located in the East Bay region of the San Francisco Bay Area along the Sacramento–San Joaquin River Delta. The city's population was 115,291 at the 2020 census. The city has grown substantially more diverse since the 1970s.
David James Pelzer is an American author of several autobiographical and self-help books. His 1995 memoir of childhood abuse, A Child Called "It": One Child's Courage to Survive, was listed on The New York Times Best Seller list for several years, and in 5 years had sold at least 1.6 million copies. The book brought Pelzer fame, and has also been a source of controversy, with accusations of several events being fabricated coming from both family members and journalists.
Grace Slick is a retired American musician and a painter whose musical career spanned four decades. She was a prominent figure in San Francisco's psychedelic music scene during the mid-1960s to the early 1970s.
AC Transit is an Oakland-based public transit agency serving the western portions of Alameda and Contra Costa counties in the East Bay of the San Francisco Bay Area. AC Transit also operates "Transbay" routes across San Francisco Bay to San Francisco and selected areas in San Mateo and Santa Clara counties. AC Transit is constituted as a special district under California law. It is governed by seven elected members. It is not a part of or under the control of Alameda or Contra Costa counties or any local jurisdictions.
The County Connection is a Concord-based public transit agency operating fixed-route bus and ADA paratransit service in and around central Contra Costa County in the San Francisco Bay Area. Established in 1980 as a joint powers authority, CCCTA assumed control of public bus service within central Contra Costa first begun by Oakland-based AC Transit as it expanded into suburban Contra Costa County in the mid-1970s. In 2023, the system had a ridership of 2,661,400, or about 9,500 per weekday as of the second quarter of 2024.
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Red Rock Island is an uninhabited, 5.8-acre (2.3 ha) island in the San Francisco Bay located just south of the Richmond–San Rafael Bridge. The property is the only privately owned island in San Francisco Bay. The boundaries of three counties – San Francisco, Marin, and Contra Costa – converge on the island. The Contra Costa portion is incorporated inside the city limits of Richmond.
Sherri Michelle Saum is an American actress. Saum is best known for her co-lead role as Lena Adams Foster in the Freeform drama series The Fosters (2013–2018) as well as a subsequent guest star role in its spinoff Good Trouble (2019–2024). She is also known for her television roles in Beggars and Choosers, Rescue Me, In Treatment and Locke & Key, as well as for her roles in the daytime soap operas Sunset Beach and One Life to Live.
Devon Winters is a fictional character from The Young and the Restless, an American soap opera on the CBS network, portrayed by Bryton James. The character, known at first as Devon Hamilton, made his first appearance on June 1, 2004. He was introduced as a homeless teenager who is taken in by the Winters family, the core African-American family within the series. Drucilla Winters sympathizes with Devon because she too was a product of the foster care system. Drucilla and her husband Neil raise Devon along with their daughter Lily and legally adopt him in 2006.
The Richmond City Council is the governing body for the city of Richmond, California. The council consists of the Mayor of Richmond and six other city council members, one designated Vice Mayor. The council members are all elected from the whole city; no members are elected by district or ward. The council members are elected to four-year terms, as opposed to the previous six-year terms. They are not all elected at once. The council members meet every first and third Tuesday of the month and, if necessary, hold special meetings on the remaining Tuesdays. Presently the entire city council is Democratic.
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Princess Sarah Jane Culberson, Lady of Bumpe is an American philanthropist, public speaker, educator, writer and actress. By birth she is a Mende princess of the Bumpe–Gao Chiefdom in Sierra Leone.
Catherine Share is an American criminal who is known as a former member of the Manson Family; she was convicted of witness intimidation in relation to the 1970 trial of the Tate-LaBianca murders. In 1971 she was convicted of armed robbery and served five years. Share was not directly involved in the Tate-LaBianca murders, for which Charles Manson and some of his followers were convicted and originally sentenced to death. She served 90 days for witness intimidation.
The Contra Costa County Superior Court, officially known as the Superior Court of California, County of Contra Costa, is the California Superior Court with jurisdiction over Contra Costa County. It has four courthouses: Martinez, Pittsburg, Richmond and Walnut Creek.
Save The Bay is a nonprofit organization dedicated to preserving San Francisco Bay and related estuarine habitat areas. It was founded by Catherine Kerr, Sylvia McLaughlin, and Esther Gulick in 1961.
Doctors Medical Center was an eight-story, 120-bed public hospital in San Pablo, California which served 250,000 residents in western Contra Costa County from 1954 to 2015.
Jeanne Córdova was an American writer and supporter of the lesbian and gay rights movement, founder of The Lesbian Tide, and a founder of the West Coast LGBT movement. A former Catholic nun, Córdova was a second-wave feminist lesbian activist and self-described butch.
Eliana Gil, is a lecturer, writer, and clinician of marriage, family and child. She is on the board of a number of professional counselling organizations that use play and art therapies, and she is the former president of the Association for Play Therapy (APT).
Tony Krajewski Thurmond is an American politician and educator who is the 28th and current California State Superintendent of Public Instruction. Thurmond was narrowly elected Superintendent of Public Instruction in 2018 over his opponent, Marshall Tuck. He was the endorsed candidate of the California Democratic Party and all five 2018 California Teachers of the Year. A Democrat, he represented the 15th Assembly district from 2014 to 2018, encompassing the northern East Bay.