Season 3 celebrates our 2026 Bessie Award winners, starting with Creator of the Year winner Anela Malik, who built a full ecosystem out of a hobby Instagram account she started almost by accident.

Beth and Anela talk about turning a creator career into an entrepreneurial one: the financial instability of the early years, why she crowdfunded Our Block instead of waiting on a brand, the pay gap she's faced as a Black creator, and what travel companies get wrong when they treat creators as marketing instead of business partners.

Enter to win: we're giving away a copy of Anela's book, American Soul: The Black History of Food in the United States. Subscribe to our email list at 85percentpodcast.com to enter.

Anela Malik is the 2026 Wanderful Bessie Award winner for Creator of the Year, honored for combining creativity with advocacy to challenge the status quo in travel. She built Unfiltered & Fed into a platform reaching nearly 400,000 people through food, travel, culture, and identity. She authored American Soul: The Black History of Food in the United States (National Geographic, 2025), a two-time NAACP Image Awards nominee, and launched Our Block, a crowdfunded series spotlighting Black-owned businesses nationwide. She's also a former U.S. diplomat, now leading small-group trips through the Middle East and North Africa.

Connect with Anela Malik

• Website: anelamalik.com
• Newsletter (Unfiltered & Fed): unfilteredandfed.com
• Instagram: @theanelamalik
• TikTok: @theanelamalik
• YouTube: @theanelamalik
• Our Block: ourblockshow.com
• Book: American Soul: The Black History of Food in the United States (National Geographic, 2025)

Chapters

• 00:05 — Welcome to Season 3 + how to enter the giveaway
• 01:44 — Introducing our Creator of the Year: Anela Malik
• 03:44 — What Creator of the Year means at Wanderful
• 06:39 — How Anela became a creator by accident
• 09:42 — Learning entrepreneurship with no safety net
• 12:04 — The moment content creation became a real career
• 15:08 — From platform to published author: American Soul
• 18:02 — Crowdfunding Our Block: telling stories no one wanted to fund
• 23:07 — What the travel industry keeps getting wrong
• 26:42 — Being evaluated as a business, not just an influencer
• 30:03 — Creators and companies doing group travel right
• 33:37 — Where to find Anela and how to work with her
• 35:14 — Outro + one more reminder about the giveaway