Amber D. Dodd

Hey there, I’m Amber.

I’m an award-winning writer and editor with a special interest in contextualizing Black America.

I currently serve as associate editor of Howard Magazine and Howard’s Office of University Communications. I manage Howard’s news site, The Dig. I’m a University copy editor and storyteller too.

I’m also a freelance weekend copyeditor and journalist for The AFRO’s D.C. bureau. At The AFRO, I’ve completed feature stories about Iota Phi Theta’s last living founder, Lonnie Spruill, The Congressional Black Caucus, and Black businesses through food reviews and stories.

My former roles include being a Racial-Equity Reporter in the Pacific Northwest at the Spokesman-Review. My award-winning reporting includes coverage of the Indigenous tribes of America’s Murdered and Missing Indigenous Person Movement (MMIP), anti-LGBTQ+ Idaho protests, and the lives of immigrants in Spokane such as boxer Fadya Hakere. I also taught seminars of race and reporting on white supremacy at Whitworth University and Gonzaga University too.

I’m all about authenticity. I love special projects. I have my own creative brand, blaQplight., a platform dedicated to educating, empowering and entertaining the Black community and our diaspora. To celebrate hip-hop’s 50th birthday, I served as the guest editor and curated Howard Magazine’s Fall ’23 issue “Hip-Hop+Howard.”

While out West, I was the founding editor of the Spokane Black Stories, an annual series which features Black high schoolers’ art in various mediums, primarily literary, every Black History Month. I was also commissioned to write for the Spectrum Yearbook in a series I named “Slice of Spectrum Life,” a mini-feature series detailing the Spokane’s queer community.

I have international works as well. For the U.K.-based, independent paper Hot Potato, I wrote about America’s 2020 presidential election from a Black women’s perspective. In 2019, I wrote an essay on working as the only Black, female sports reporter at Mississippi State University for ‘Unbias the News: Why diversity matters for journalism,’ a book featuring 31 journalists from around the world for the German-based anthology. I was a sports journalist for eight (8) years, covering SEC women’s basketball, the WNBA’s Washington Mystics, and a reporter on high school and little league sports throughout the East coast and in Mississippi during college.

Outside of my journalistic thesis, I am a nonfiction writer and Latin scholar. With an emphasis on Latin to English translation, semantic word choice, and sentence structures, my Latin scholarship is a focal point of my copyediting practices. My nonfiction has been recognized with a few awards such as my hybrid piece ‘Instagram is Nonfiction’ that placed second in Stellium Literary Magazine’s Cusp Prize. I won the $1,000 prize for TEXLANDIA’s Magazine’s 2022 Best in the Land Contest for my nonfiction short story ‘Party Favors.’

Contest judge and writer Cameron Dezen Hammon said, “At times, ‘Party Favors’ leans toward the psychic force of Kiese Laymon’s ‘Heavy,’ and the musicality of Junot Diaz’s ‘This Is How You Lose Her.’ This writer is one to watch.”

I use she/her pronouns. I’m from Odenton, Maryland and earned a degree from Mississippi State University where I obtained my bachelor’s in journalism and broadcasting.

In my spare time, if any, I like listening to Pharrell’s four-count intros, watching Southeastern Conference sports and hours-long thrift runs. B’Day is Beyonce’s best album.

I do not believe in the Oxford comma, but I won’t argue against the stylebook. My dream job is being the guest editor of the Merriam Webster AAVE dictionary in 2045.

- AD