By Alena Wiese
There is a moment in most anthologies when the collective voice breaks down, when one chapter sounds like the next, when the energy flattens, when you feel the editorial hand smoothing everything into sameness. Alpha Queens Rising: Where Purpose Meets Power never reaches that moment.
It is a book of eleven distinctly different women, writing from eleven distinctly different wounds and victories, and it shows on every page. The anthology has reached readers across the country since publication and was recently featured on a Times Square billboard in New York City. For a debut collective with no single celebrity name on the cover, that kind of visibility is extraordinary.
We went into the pages to find out why. What follows is the story of each of the eleven women who built it.
“This is not a book project. It is a living legacy.”
Karissa Adkins
Karissa Adkins
CEO & Founder, The Alpha Queen Collective® | Identity Engineer | Movement Founder
Karissa Adkins opens the book with a line that leaves no room for comfortable distance: “I wasn’t born into ease. I grew up in chaos.” She was a teen mom fighting for stability. She survived abuse. She lost her mother. She walked away from a marriage that no longer aligned. In her telling, each of those chapters was not a derailment. It was preparation.
As the CEO and Founder of The Alpha Queen Collective® and creator of the 10 Universal Laws of Iconic Leadership, Adkins built her framework not from a business school curriculum but from the lived experience of rebuilding herself from the ground up, repeatedly. Her methodology, The Alpha Queen Activation System, is rooted in identity reconstruction and what she calls sovereign leadership, leading from the inside out, not the outside in.
She is also the architect of this entire project. When the foreword describes her as someone who “doesn’t motivate, she activates,” it is not marketing language. It is a structural fact about how this book came to exist.
Tiffany Lukasiewicz
Founder, Lioness Alchemy Collective
Tiffany Lukasiewicz was the girl who learned early that being too much, too loud, too energetic, too present, drew pain. Dyslexia made school a daily humiliation. A relationship that required her to stay small nearly erased what was left of her voice.
Her chapter, “Stand Tall. Roar Loud. Live Fierce,” is a reclamation narrative that does not flinch. As the founder of the Lioness Alchemy Collective, Lukasiewicz has built her work around helping women recover the version of themselves that learned to disappear. She knows that territory intimately, having mapped it by living through it.
“There is a difference between loving someone and losing yourself for them. I didn’t know that yet.”
Tiffany Lukasiewicz
Traci Coven
Founder, Inner Game Performance
A sharp pop. A fractured wrist. A 17-year-old point guard who had built her entire identity around the game, suddenly unable to play. Traci Coven’s chapter begins at the moment her external identity collapsed, and chronicles what happened when she tried to replace it with control over food and body instead.
Her path through an eating disorder and into recovery, and then into a career as the founder of Inner Game Performance, is not told as a triumphant arc. It is told with the honest acknowledgment that performance culture, whether in sports, in business, or in life, can disguise dysfunction as discipline. Her work now is helping others recognize the difference. She dedicated her chapter to the memory of her cousin Michele.
Larissa Reid
Founder, In The Black Business Services | 2023 NAACP Bakersfield Business of the Year
When you meet Larissa Reid, you see calm confidence. What you don’t see is what it took to build it: twins born at 25 weeks, a near-death experience from placenta accreta, years of financial chaos that she quietly learned to turn into expertise, and a grandmother who taught her numbers through discount-rack math games.
Reid is an award-winning entrepreneur and the founder of In The Black Business Services, a national boutique firm handling bookkeeping, payroll, tax preparation, and year-round tax strategy for small businesses and nonprofits. She owns her firm’s first building, with a content studio upstairs and a weekend pop-up space for local vendors. She built all of it while raising five children and surviving circumstances that would have stopped most people entirely.
“You don’t have to do this alone.”
Larissa Reid
Jennifer Jorgensen
Suicide-Prevention Advocate & Program Creator
Jennifer Jorgensen’s chapter is the hardest to read and the most necessary. She is a mother who recognized the warning signs in her daughter, sought help from every available system, was dismissed at every turn, and received the call no parent should ever receive.
What she did next is the story. Rather than let tragedy become the ending, Jorgensen built a mission: to ensure that no other parent encounters the silence, the dismissal, and the systemic failure that cost her child her life. Her work as a suicide-prevention advocate is not theoretical. It is built from the wreckage of the thing she could not prevent, and from the fierce determination that it will not happen to someone else’s family without a fight.
Sarah Bouse, FNTP
Creator, The ASCEND Method™ | Functional Nutritional Therapy Practitioner
Sarah Bouse spent years doing what many women are taught to do: push through, stay quiet, and assume suffering is normal. Fatigue followed her through childhood and adolescence. Symptoms were dismissed as inconveniences. Then her body drew a hard line.
“What makes Sarah a leader worth following is not that she mastered health. It’s that she had to fight for it.”
Stefanie Mendoza
Owner, Modern Painting | President, Elite Referral Networking Omaha
Stefanie Mendoza’s chapter title says it plainly: “Forged, Not Fixed.” She was a teenager who learned survival in an unstable household, stepped away from school, drifted into chaos, and then made a choice to stop. She earned her GED. She reclaimed her direction. She became a mother and decided her choices were no longer just about survival. They were about legacy.
She co-founded a painting company, watched it rise and collapse, and in 2019 relaunched Modern Painting from the ground up. Today she runs an established residential and commercial painting business, is a mother of four, and serves as President of Elite Referral Networking Omaha. She leads with humor, honesty, and what she describes as unapologetic drive. Her life, she says, is proof that perfection is not the prerequisite for leadership. Courage is.
Samantha Rambo, FNP-C
Founder, Wellness for Any Body™ | Family Nurse Practitioner
Samantha Rambo did not start her healthcare career with a calling. She started it because childcare cost more than she could earn anywhere else, and working as a CNA let her keep her daughter safe, fed, and warm. Then a patient changed everything.
“She refused to accept a system that fails the vulnerable, and chose instead to rise and rebuild it from the inside out.”
Leanne Harrell-McCoy
Leadership & Movement Mentor
Leanne Harrell-McCoy was a woman defined by motion, a leadership and movement mentor who led by example, pushed limits, and showed others what was possible. Then she grabbed a laundry basket, her feet tangled beneath her, and she hit the tile floor. Five spiral fractures. Femur shattered from the kneecap upward. No weight-bearing. No walking. Months of stillness for a woman whose identity was built on movement.
Her chapter, written from the floor of that experience, is about what happens to a leader when the thing they led with is taken away. What Harrell-McCoy found in that stillness was not weakness. It was a version of strength she had never needed to access before: quiet, unseen, and ultimately more durable than anything she had built in motion.
Kay Spears, MS, CCN, CNS
Functional Nutritionist | Brain–Gut Healing Practitioner
Kay Spears was the dyslexic child who believed she was not smart enough. Letters scattered. Numbers flipped. She was moved from school to school, pushed into remedial classes, labeled and relabeled. She learned that invisibility was safer than being seen struggling. She froze mid-sentence reading aloud once, heard the classroom laugh, and decided silence was protection.
Decades later, after a three-year collapse into vertigo that dismantled her professional life, Spears rebuilt herself through the very science she now teaches. She is a functional nutritionist focused on root-cause brain-gut work, maintaining a global virtual practice and leading retreats with her husband, Chef Andrew. Her own recovery shaped the framework she now offers to clients.
“She rose from academic struggle and a three-year collapse to rebuild her professional life around the science of healing.”
Angel Cottrell
CEO & Founder, Apollo Consultancy Group
By 27, Angel Cottrell had already founded and led a multi-million-dollar nonprofit in Santa Barbara that served people with severe developmental disabilities. She created supported-living homes, launched a state and federally licensed day program, recruited and led teams, and shifted systems, all without money, education, or a roadmap. Only passion, grit, and what she calls an unshakable calling.
Then her 30s arrived and dismantled everything. Her business collapsed. Her support system vanished. The life she had built fell apart faster than she could process. Angel Cottrell’s chapter is about what she built from that wreckage: Apollo Consultancy Group, a strategic consulting and coaching firm for CEOs, founders, and executives. Her philosophy, forged in total collapse, is direct: to experience significant change, you must change significantly. She teaches embodiment over performance. She teaches leaders to build businesses that are alive.
What Eleven Stories Build Together
What is striking about Alpha Queens Rising, read chapter by chapter, is not the consistency of the stories. It is the consistency of the quality of survival. These are not women who had easier paths and chose well. These are women who had hard paths and chose to keep building anyway. A fractured femur. A daughter lost to a system that failed her. A business collapsed twice. A body that stopped working. A childhood spent believing she was broken.
The book has reached readers across the country since publication, appeared on a Times Square billboard, and donated $1,000 to FITGirl Inc., a Nebraska-based nonprofit building confidence and resilience in girls. Those are the external markers. The internal ones are in the pages.
Eleven women. Eleven different definitions of what it looks like to rise. One framework that says purpose is more durable than pressure, and a readership that, week after week, suggests a lot of women agree.
Alpha Queens Rising: Where Purpose Meets Power is available in Kindle and print formats on Amazon.
