Jeannine Amber

Jeannine Amber has built her career helping people tell their stories. She spent the majority of her career writing for magazines, traveling across the country and around the world to report on communities in crisis. She has penned more than a dozen award-winning investigative features, along with health and human interest stories, celebrity profiles, and provocative pieces about sex and relationships. In 2014, she transitioned into book collaboration and ghostwriting. Her work includes Rabbit: The Autobiography of Ms. Pat, published by HarperCollins, a gripping story of motherhood, crime, and redemption. It was named one of 2017’s best memoirs by Amazon’s editors and nominated for an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literature.

In 2001, after writing features about everything from the plight of undocumented students in New York City’s public schools to racism in Hollywood, Amber became a mother. Never one to miss a deadline, she gave birth on a Saturday afternoon and turned in a story to her editor first thing Monday morning. In the following years, she freelanced as a sex columnist for BET online and a feature writer for various national magazines. In 2005, she joined the staff of Essence as the magazine’s only senior writer. While there, she wrote and edited more than two dozen award-winning feature stories.

Amber has been recognized by the New York Association of Black Journalists for her international series “Stolen Childhood,” about AIDS orphans and child soldiers in northern Uganda. She also received first place for cultural reporting for “Dirty Dancing,” about the exploitation of Black women in music videos. She has received six National Association of Black Journalists Salute to Excellence Awards, including recognition for her investigative series on domestic sex trafficking and her international reporting on child marriage in Niger.

Her feature stories “Number One with a Bullet,” about a Philadelphia family grieving for their murdered son in the nation’s homicide capital; “Trouble in Paradise,” which explored homophobia in Jamaica; “The Danger Outside,” about the murder of Trayvon Martin; and “Your Teens’ Secret Sex Life,” about middle schoolers and early sex, have received professional recognition, including Henry R. Luce and Front Page Awards.

“The Talk,” an opinion piece Amber wrote for Time about Black parents’ response to the murder of Trayvon Martin, was excerpted in two books: Of Poetry and Prose: From Emmett Till to Trayvon Martin, published by W.W. Norton and Company, and Called to Be Free: How the Civil Rights Movement Created a New Nation, published by Time.

When not writing, Amber works as a media consultant, helping businesspeople, fashion insiders, and artists prepare for public speaking engagements and media appearances.

Learn more at Jeannine Amber’s official website.