The NAACP Image Awards, a celebration of Black excellence in film, TV, theatre, music, and literature, air on Saturday night, and Dallas Mavericks CEO Cynt Marshall’s 2022 memoir, You’ve Been Chosen, is one of five nominees for Outstanding Literary Work - Biography/Autobiography.
“My friends are excited about it. My coworkers are excited about it. Everybody’s just gone crazy with it," Marshall smiled.
The impetus for her memoir was the cancer diagnosis of Stage 3 colon cancer in December 2010. She had just turned 51.
Marshall was married, a mother of four, and the president of AT&T North Carolina.
Get top local stories in DFW delivered to you every morning. Sign up for NBC DFW's News Headlines newsletter.
“Twelve years ago I was going through chemo this time of year, January through June. And there's not a day that goes by when I don't realize just how blessed I am to still be here,” Marshall said.
She chronicled her diagnosis, treatment, and survival in candid updates to her team and posts on the CaringBridge website. She wrote powerful words of hope and optimism and was encouraged to put them in a book.
“I thought I turned in a masterpiece,” she said but her publisher wanted more and asked her to work with a ghostwriter.
The virtual discussions happened during the COVID pandemic.
“She was just pulling stories out of me about my life because the whole premise was in order for me to battle cancer the way I did that there had to be something else that happened in my life before then to give me the resilience, the attitude, the will to fight it the way I did,” she said.
There were many things in Marshall’s life that built her resilience, personal and professional challenges that would’ve derailed many people from reaching their goals.
Marshall persevered through her childhood with an abusive father yet a mother devoted to her six children and grounded them in faith and education.
As an adult, there were four miscarriages, the loss of a baby girl then the four children who came into her and her husband’s life through adoption.
She celebrated history-making firsts from high school to college and in her career. Marshall gets candid about facing racism on the job.
She shared the struggle over cancer that threatened her life and the brutal chemotherapy that saved it.
“I just think about all the things that have happened and the things that I was, that I actually was chosen to endure and to experience, I'm just really blessed,” Marshall said.
Her mother’s words when she learned her daughter had been diagnosed with colon cancer led to the title of the book.
“When she was talking to me, she just let me know this wasn't by accident that I had truly been chosen for this. And one day, she said it, one day you will tell the story and it will bless a lot of people and so that's where we are now,” Marshall said.
Marshall simply wanted her book to help people on their cancer journey. Yet in sharing so much of her life, she touches anyone looking for guidance and inspiration as they navigate past struggle.
Her own path has made Marshall a history-maker, one of the country’s most influential business leaders, a highly sought-after speaker and the woman Mark Cuban turned to five years ago when he hired her as CEO to help him get the Dallas Mavericks organization past scandal in the front office. She was the NBA’s first Black woman CEO.
“I didn't call him. I didn't lobby for this job. I didn't even know about this job and he wasn't trying to make history. He was just trying to make a difference for his organization but in selecting me, Mark Cuban actually made history and I don't want to lose sight of the fact that, you know, we're all in this together and we all do this together and together we make Black history and we make American history,” she said.
And with more chapters in her story still to be written.
After being selected by a committee, the winner of the NAACP Image Award in Outstanding Literary Work - Biography/Autobiography will be announced in a virtual event Tuesday night.
