By Lani Gering

Much has been written in and on several local media outlets in the last month about Alexandria’s newly sworn in Mayor – Alyia Gaskins. Even Wikipedia has her covered:

“Alyia Gaskins is an American public health professional, urban planner, and politician serving as the mayor of Alexandria, Virginia. She assumed office as Alexandria’s first Black female mayor in January 2025, having previously focused on health equity, infrastructure, and housing issues throughout her career.

Gaskins pursued higher education at Vanderbilt University, earning a degree in medicine, health, and society.^[1] She subsequently obtained a M.P.H. from the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health and a Master’s in Urban Planning from the Georgetown University School of Continuing Studies.^[1] Gaskins also completed a professional certificate in municipal finance from the University of Chicago.”

Those write ups concentrated mainly on her impressive credentials and her vision for Alexandria but I wanted to concentrate of getting to know more about her on a more personal level. This is a “personality” profile…

We met for our interview just 25 days after she had been sworn in. As anticipated, it has been a whirlwind of events and meetings. While she has been accustomed to the obligations as a Councilwoman for the last 4 years, the role of Mayor takes on a whole new meaning. Being the cities first Black female and quite possibly the youngest Mayor at 35 years of age, shines additional attention on her but she is very much up to the task.

Mayor Gaskins is definitely a people person. She is very warm and inviting and definitely easy to talk to. When I asked her what her interests were outside of her mayoral duties, her first answer was spending time with her family and friends. She also likes to plan parties and organize gatherings – I guess that ties in with her Masters in Urban Planning degree. She says she uses some of her creative side to do some scrap booking, mainly with her children’s art – some of which I believe was on display in her office.

When I inquired about the kids ages, I was a bit taken aback to find out that she has a 4 year-old son, Ezekiel, and a 2 year-old daughter, Eliana. Good Lord! Being a working Mom is one thing but taking on the task of Mayor of a large city in addition to wrangling toddlers is a huge feat. She told me between she and her husband Greg they are getting it figured out. Afterall, she’s only been in office for a month. She did relate a pretty funny story that kind of sheds a light on future events involving the kids. While the family was attending a service commemorating the National Day of Prayer at Christ Church – sitting in the famous “George Washington sat here” pew with a British Admiral and Congressman Don Byer – Ezekiel and Eliana dumped out the puzzles that were intended to keep them entertained and ended up on the floor crawling around and between Congressman Byers legs. She said that they were “quite the experience” for everyone and that she was quite mortified but he took it in stride and said it was “fun”.

In addition to her husband and kids, she is very attached to her 14 year-old beagle, Riley. Beagles are inherently very smart pooches and she says Riley is a “mini genius”. He watches things for days and plots ways to get food. He has been known to move a chair from the dining room table next to the stove in order to get up on the counter in the kitchen. It appears that he likes bread. When I told her she might want to consider getting him a partner in crime, she said that role has seemingly been taken upon by her daughter.

When she and Greg moved to Alexandria 9 years ago, they moved into the Cameron Station development in the West End. We talked about how the landscape of Alexandria has changed just in those years and I told her how it has changed since I moved into 131 North Payne in the spring of 1992. I’m not sure how impressed she was that there were still “ladies of the night” and dealers of illicit drugs hanging out at the corner of King and Henry then. My how things have changed.

When it came down to deciding what we were going to use for the backdrop for the photo for this piece, we picked the prominent piece of artwork that hangs in her office. When asked about the piece, she told me that it was painted in real time “live” in City Hall during the swearing in of she and the new City Council l members. It is a 36” x 24” sized acrylic on canvas entitled “Spontaneous Combustion” by Virginia artist Khalid Thompson. She feels that he captured the essence of the event perfectly – diversity, joy and community.

We did spend a few minutes talking about plans that are in the making for a pump station that may prove to be a hopeful solution to managing the recurring flooding in Old Town and the proposed renovation of City Hall – a project that is coming under scrutiny from several sides. No matter what the final decision is, the infrastructure of the building needs a ton of work and that is paramount to keeping the building exterior in place.

In any case, regardless of some of the questionable rhetoric coming down from the current administration, Mayor Gaskins tells me she is concentrating on doing all that she can within some of those constraints to make sure that Alexandrian’s quality of life remains high and, after meeting her in person one-on-one, I have total confidence that she means that from the bottom of her heart.