Rochelle Riley ended a nearly 20-year career as a nationally syndicated, award-winning Detroit columnist in 2019 to become the City of Detroit’s Director of Arts and Culture.
In that role, she guides the city’s investment in the arts and creates opportunities for transformative innovation. Her most recent project was the nation’s first city-wide memorial to victims of Covid-19: 15 funeral processions that circled the city’s Belle Isle past 907 photo billboards of victims. The installation, the largest in the city’s history, gained international attention in August 2020 and provided closure for families across the city who could not have individual funerals for their loved ones.
The author, essayist, and arts advocate travels the country hosting conversations about the burden that America still bears by refusing to deal with the aftermath of American enslavement. She is the author of “The Burden: African Americans and the Enduring Impact of Slavery.”
Join NSNC Executive Director Cassie McClure as she talks with Rochelle Riley about Riley co-authoring the recently released book “That They Lived,” a collection of essays and photographs about famous African Americans that all children should know (Wayne State University Press, 2021).
When: Thursday, August 26, at 7:30 ET
More Bio: ROCHELLE RILEY
Riley worked previously at The (Louisville) Courier-Journal, The Dallas Morning News, and The Washington Post. She received the 2017 Ida B. Wells Award from the National Association of Black Journalists “for her outstanding efforts to make newsrooms and news coverage more accurately reflect the diversity of the communities they serve” and the 2018 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society of Professional Journalists. She was a 2016 inductee into the Michigan Journalism Hall of Fame and a 2019 inductee into the North Carolina Media and Journalism Hall of Fame.
Rochelle received the 2017 Eugene C. Pulliam Editorial Fellowship from the Society of Professional Journalists to study how trauma impedes how children learn. She is a co-founder of Letters to Black Girls, an initiative to give letters of advice and encouragement from women to girls across the country.
