Over the course of her career, she has worked for The Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, the Root and Essence, where she served as deputy editor, supervising the magazine's news and culture coverage. As a staff writer on the Chicago Tribune’s metropolitan news desk, she was part of the reporting team that won the Grand Prize, Robert Kennedy Journalism Award for a series on murdered children in Chicago; the team also was the finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. She graduated from Dartmouth College with honors and obtained a masters’ degree from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. She is the author of The Real America: The Tangled Roots of Race and Identity.