Journalist & Communications Strategist
- Leslie D. Rose
Leslie D. Rose is a communications strategist and culture/advocacy journalist with two decades of experience. She enjoys facilitating socially responsible dialogue and making people comfortable having honest conversations. Most of her writing focuses on social advocacy, criminal justice, women's health, music, celebrities, family and relationships, and mental health.
She's led philanthropic and higher ed communications helping to garner positive press, shape social media presence, and enhance internal and external media output. She's also been everything from a city newspaper
aide to a community newspaper editor with bylines across local magazines and
newspapers to major digital media outlets. A few of her notable interviews include Mariah Carey, Maxine Waters, Kerry Washington, Chris Rock, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Allyson Felix, Will Ferrell, and Bootsy Collins. Leslie often lends an advocacy lens to her
cultural pieces, giving a charge to the audience while presenting a new view.
She has written extensively about the negative impact of using rap lyrics as
evidence on trial. Leslie moderated the panel discussion Hip-Hop & We Don’t Stop: Where Do We Go from Here, featured on the ABC/Hulu documentary Rap Trap: Hip-Hop on Trial. She also served as the main voice journalist on the season 2 finale of VH1's Celebrity True Crime Story about former No Limit rapper Mac Phipps' wrongful conviction.
As a creative writer, Leslie’s focus is narrative poetry and creative non-fiction. She has competed in team and individual poetry slams at the national level. Her work has been published and featured on Passages North, All Def Poetry, and midnight & indigo, among other outlets. She is the author of the full-length journalism-inspired book of poetry, The Newsroom, which examines the emotional battle journalists often have within themselves as storytellers and humans. Among other publications, she has four research papers in The St. James Encyclopedia of Hip Hop Culture, 1st Edition (2018, Gale/St. James Press).
Leslie is a proud HBCU graduate with a B.A. in mass communication and creative writing from Xavier University of Louisiana. She has national awards in marketing for integrated campaigns and special videos, writing and editing awards in journalism, and community recognitions for volunteer work. She is available for freelance or contract hire in journalism, event/panel moderation, hosting/emceeing, public relations and editorial consulting, photography, and as a teaching artist in poetry or journalism.
