Dr. Michelle Dartis: Turning Resilience, Storytelling, and Legacy Into a Life That Leaves a Mark
By Forbes.tips Editorial Team
For Dr. Michelle Dartis, success is not simply about collecting titles, publishing books, or reaching professional milestones. It is about creating something meaningful enough to outlive the moment—and using her experiences to help other people recognize the value of their own stories.
An author, educator, entrepreneur, writer, and founder of Leave A Mark Press, Dartis has built a career that brings together education, storytelling, publishing, history, and community. Her journey has been shaped as much by perseverance and personal responsibility as it has by professional achievement.
Today, she is entering another chapter with a message that reaches beyond publishing: there is no predetermined age or stage of life at which a person must stop dreaming.
Building a Life Around Purpose
Dartis describes herself as someone who has spent much of her life helping others discover their voices through education, storytelling, and community.
That mission has taken many forms.
A native of Indianapolis, Indiana, she has worked in education, writing, behavioral health, research, and historical preservation. Her academic background includes social work, library science, higher education, and human and social services, culminating in a Ph.D. in Human and Social Services.
Her path to the doctorate was not an effortless climb.
Dartis has written openly about completing her doctoral journey while simultaneously facing family responsibilities, professional demands, grief, financial realities, and other challenges. When she eventually crossed the commencement stage in January 2026, the accomplishment represented more than another credential. It represented proof of what persistence could make possible.
The experience also changed how she viewed achievement. Rather than seeing the doctorate as an endpoint, she came to see it as evidence of the person she had become while pursuing it.
That perspective now influences much of her work.
Leave A Mark Press: Stories With a Purpose
Entrepreneurship became another extension of Dartis’s commitment to storytelling through Leave A Mark Press.
The independent publishing venture gives her a platform not only for her own work but also for a larger vision centered on literacy, education, storytelling, and helping aspiring writers bring meaningful stories into the world.
Dartis has described years of quietly balancing teaching, behavioral health work, doctoral studies, family responsibilities, research, writing, and entrepreneurship before fully recognizing that those seemingly separate experiences were preparing her to build something of her own.
Her philosophy is captured simply in the Leave A Mark Press message:
Leave A Mark. Change A Life.
For Dartis, publishing is not only about placing books on shelves. It is about creating conversations, preserving experiences, and making readers—particularly younger readers—feel seen.
When Family Becomes the Story
Some of Dartis’s most meaningful work has emerged directly from her own family.
Her children’s book Trinity’s Earthly Arrival from Heaven was inspired by her granddaughter Trinity. Dartis’s daughter had previously been told she would be unable to have children, making Trinity’s arrival something the family viewed as a miracle. Rather than keeping the experience within the family, Dartis transformed it into a story about love, possibility, and hope.
Writing the book also revealed something important about her creative process. Instead of finding the deeply personal subject difficult to write about, Dartis described creating the story as cathartic and celebratory.
Her granddaughter would later inspire another important project.
After six-year-old Trinity unexpectedly told her grandmother that she wished she were white, Dartis began thinking more deeply about racial identity, self-esteem, family history, and the messages children absorb from the world around them.
That moment eventually contributed to I Wish I Was White: Racial Identity and Self-Esteem, a children’s book designed to affirm identity while connecting young readers with family and cultural history.
Discovering a Family Legacy
Dartis’s commitment to storytelling has also turned her toward historical preservation.
While researching her own family, she discovered a history she had never fully known.
Her grandfather, Herbert Hawkins, had been a businessman connected to Indianapolis’s historic Indiana Avenue, once one of the city’s most important centers of Black culture and entrepreneurship. Dartis discovered through archival research that Hawkins operated businesses including a filling station located at 614 Indiana Avenue, across from what is now the Madam Walker Legacy Center.
The discovery transformed family research into something larger.
It demonstrated how easily important stories can disappear when no one actively preserves them—and reinforced Dartis’s determination to keep asking questions, searching archives, writing, and saying the names of people whose contributions might otherwise be forgotten.
Dreams Don’t Have an Expiration Date
That same belief in possibility is now carrying Dartis into unexpected spaces.
In her 2026 Next Runway Star profile, Dartis explained that she wants people to see more than someone walking a runway. She wants them to see resilience, purpose, and possibility.
Her message is particularly directed toward women who may believe certain opportunities have passed them by.
As Dartis puts it, “dreams don’t have expiration dates.”
Her own journey supports that philosophy.
Doors closed. Plans changed. Responsibilities accumulated. Yet she continued earning degrees, writing, teaching, researching, publishing, and eventually creating Leave A Mark Press.
Rather than allowing setbacks to determine the ending, she used them to reshape the direction.
Looking Ahead
Dartis’s plans for Leave A Mark Press extend well beyond publishing additional books.
She has identified ambitions that include expanding book distribution, developing educational and literacy resources, increasing school visits, workshops and speaking engagements, and growing writing and publishing services for aspiring authors.
It is a vision built around multiplication: one story helping another person discover theirs, one book creating a conversation, and one person’s perseverance showing someone else that beginning again remains possible.
Michelle Dartis’s story is therefore not simply about becoming an author, earning a Ph.D., or launching a publishing company.
It is about becoming willing to believe in what years of quiet work were building toward.
And perhaps that is what leaving a mark really means—not merely being remembered, but creating something that gives another person permission to move forward.
Connect With Dr. Michelle Dartis
Email: leaveamarkpress@gmail.com
Books / Amazon: View Michelle Dartis’s book on Amazon
Facebook: Michelle Dartis on Facebook
Instagram: @drmdenise1988
LinkedIn: Dr. Michelle Dartis on LinkedIn
TikTok: @drmichelledenise
