Rochelle Riley

Rochelle Riley is the Director of Arts and Culture for the City of Detroit. She formerly was a nationally syndicated columnist for the Detroit Free Press in Detroit, Michigan, United States. She was an advocate in her column for improved race relations, literacy, community building, and children.

Personal Rochelle Riley grew up in Tarboro, North Carolina where she was raised in part by her grandfather Willie Bennie Pitt and grandmother Lowney Hilliard Pitt.

She said in her acceptance speech at the Ida B. Wells Award that her grandmother's curiosity influenced her own curiosity about current events and their impact on our lives. She has one daughter. Rochelle attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she majored in journalism and English. In 2008, she completed a Knight-Wallace Fellowship at the University of Michigan.

Career

Rochelle Riley has appeared on NPR, MSNBC, CNN and FOX2.

Notable works of journalism Her columns about former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick were a part of the entry that won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize in local reporting. She is also notable for her excellence in journalism and for mentoring future journalists to ensure that newsrooms reflect the diversity of their communities, which is why she won the Ida B. Wells Award from the National Association of Black Journalists and Northwestern University. She also is known for advocating for press freedom as a member of the International Press Institute and the NABJ Global Journalism Task Force. She has spent years crusading for better lives for children, government accountability, improved race relations and increased adult literacy, by helping to raise nearly $2 million for literacy causes in Michigan.