Reniqua Allen-Lamphere

For years Reniqua wrote about the American Dream: who gets promised upward mobility, who actually gets it, and what it costs the people it skips. Her first book, It Was All a Dream, followed Black millennials chasing a version of success the country kept moving out of reach. Her forthcoming Black Dreams traces the same idea through Black popular culture.

Then came the dream she had not thought to interrogate. Children were supposed to be the part you did not have to fight for. Instead there was IVF, endometriosis, fibroids, doctors who told her she had waited too long, and the particular loneliness of sitting in a waiting room where nobody looked like her. It turned out this dream is elusive too, and most elusive for the people already told to expect less.

So she turned the reporting on it. Infertile Ground, Fertility Noir, Letting Go, and Oshun Griot itself all come out of the same conclusion: this is not a private failure, it is a system, and systems can be written about, filmed, and rebuilt. She wrote about it first from inside her own treatment, in Zora, deciding whether to keep going while the clinics were closed. She had asked the question in the New York Times four years earlier, before it was hers: is egg freezing only for white women?

Before that, the same question in a different key: It Was All a Dream (Bold Type / Hachette, 2019) on Black millennials and upward mobility, and Black Dreams (Columbia University Press, 2029) on the American Dream through Black popular culture. Fertility Noir follows from Ballantine / Penguin Random House in 2027. She has produced for PBS, Apple TV+, HBO, and E!. The films and the book →

Her journalism has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, The New Republic, Quartz, Teen Vogue, and Glamour. She has produced film, video, and radio for PBS, Apple TV+, HBO, E!, and the American Museum of Natural History, and has appeared on CNN, PBS Amanpour, MSNBC Films, NPR, WNYC, the CBC, and C-SPAN.

She holds fellowships from New America, The Nation Institute, Demos, and the CUNY/Schumann Center, a PhD in American Studies from Rutgers, and dual degrees in Journalism and Political Science from American University. Born and raised in New Jersey, she still lives there with her husband and two children, both rainbow babies.