Soraya Chemaly

Soraya Lisa Catherine Chemaly (born 1966 in Florida) is a Bahamian-American author, activist and feminist. Her best-known book, Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women's Anger, has been translated into multiple languages.

Early life and education Soraya Chemaly was born in Florida in 1966. Her parents are Edward and Norma Chemaly of Nassau, Bahamas. She descends from Bahamians and Arab Christians who emigrated from Jordan and Lebanon to Haiti in the 1920s. She grew up a strict Catholic in the Bahamas, where her parents owned a chain of gift shops.

Career Prior to 2010, Chemaly worked for over fifteen years as a marketing consultant and executive in the media and IT industries. Her employers included the Gannett media corporation, and the Claritas technology company, where she was promoted to senior vice president of Marketing Strategy.

Chemaly then changed careers to become an activist and freelance journalist, writing for The Atlantic, Time, The Guardian, HuffPost and Ms., among others. Her main areas of focus have been freedom of expression, gender, women's rights, sexualised violence, media and technology. She is also the director of the Women's Media Center Speech Project, an initiative "dedicated to expanding women's freedom of expression and curbing online harassment and abuse."

Rage Becomes Her Chemaly's first book Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women's Anger was published in 2018 and reviewed (often in tandem with Rebecca Traister's 2018 book Good and Mad) in numerous publications such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The New Yorker. Seth Borenstein of NYU said of the book:

In 2019, the book was published in French, Italian, Spanish and Dutch. The German translation by Suhrkamp Verlag appeared in May 2020 under the title Speak Out! The Power of Female Rage. Susanne Billig wrote in Deutschlandfunk Kultur that Chemaly moves "back and forth between gripping reports of experiences and impressive research into psychological, sociological, biological and political science studies." Susan Vahabzadeh (Süddeutsche Zeitung) read the book as "alternately a flaming manifesto, a report of self-experience and a derivation from studies". Vahabzadeh added that most women probably agree with Chemaly "that anger is not welcome in women". In taz, Helen Roth praised the author for not leaving readers "alone with their anger, but offers practical recommendations for how to channel their anger in a constructive way. In doing so, the award-winning journalist puts an end to the myth of women as sudden and vengeful Xanthippes and develops an image of women that has the power to transform society into a freer and more open one."

Awards In 2013, Chemaly won the "Donna Allen Award" for feminist advocacy from the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC), and was named "Secular Activist of the Year" by The Feminist Wire. In 2014, she was selected by Elle magazine as one of the 25 most inspiring women to follow on social media. In 2016, she received the Women and Media Award from the Women's Institute for Freedom of the Press (WIFP). The following year, Syracuse University's Newhouse School of Public Communications gave her a Mirror Award for excellence in industry reporting; she was specifically honored in the "Best Single Story" category for co-writing a 2016 investigative piece on free speech and moderation of online content. In 2019, she received the Feminist Power Award from the Feminist Press. Her mother-in-law, Patricia Bleecker Jones, formerly served as president general of the Colonial Dames of America in Manhattan.

Writings Books Rage Becomes Her. The Power of Women's Anger, Atria Books, NYC, 2018, ISBN 978-1501189555. Speak out! Die Kraft weiblicher Wut, aus dem amerikanischen Englisch von Kirsten Riesselmann und Gesine Schröder, Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin 2020, ISBN 978-3518469460. The Resilience Myth: New Thinking on Grit, Strength, and Growth after Trauma, Atria/One Signal Publishers, NYC, 2024, ISBN 1668079135. All We Want Is Everything: How We Dismantle Male Supremacy, Atria/One Signal Publishers, 2025,

Chapters and forewords "The Unapologetic No" (chapter) in "Slut-Shaming and the Sex Police: Social Media, Sex, and Free Speech" (chapter) in "Dress Codes or How Schools Skirt Around Sexism and Homophobia" (chapter) in "The Quietly Relentless" (chapter) in Foreword to "Demographics, Design and Free Speech: How Demographics Have Produced Social Media Optimized for Abuse and the Silencing of Marginalized Voices" (chapter) in "Constructing the Future: The Believe Me Internet" (chapter) in Foreword to "Society Makes a Choice Before Any of Us Can" (chapter) in

Selected articles

Co-written with Catherine Buni.