Brock Akil has been drawing insights from her experiences for as long as she has been a working writer. Raised in the L.A. area and, after her parents’ divorce, Kansas City, Mo., she studied journalism at Northwestern, then moved back to her hometown to pursue a career in TV. She arrived amid an explosion of Black sitcoms—The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Living Single, Martin, Family Matters—and rose through the writers’ room ranks on Fox’s South Central and UPN’s Moesha, both produced by Ralph Farquhar, a mentor. One early triumph was an award-winning 1998 Moesha episode in which the titular teen, played by America’s R&B sweetheart Brandy, is prescribed birth control. It was, Brock Akil recalls with a joy so immediate it’s like she’s suddenly back in that moment, the show’s first script to receive no network notes. Still, she knew not everything she wanted to express could be conveyed in a teen sitcom. “If I'm writing for a comedy like Moesha, I enjoy the interiority of this young girl,” she says. “But there's a deeper interiority of us”—that is, Black women. “Moesha wrote in her diary, and my diary was quite different.” It was, in fact, a “lifeline” as she processed some of the most difficult moments of her past. Once she realized she might have a long screenwriting career ahead of her, she imagined her ideal project, a movie born out of these reflections. That is when she started making the notes that would become Dionne Daphne.