JAMIA Wilson is many things: an activist, a feminist, a writer, an editor, a bridge. What connects her many roles is a love of connection with the world, a connection with people and their ideas. She sees what a good future can look like and has been working toward creating this through her love of books, writing, editing, and fostering a new generation of readers and thinkers.
Wilson’s publishing career started at Feminist Press, where she was the executive director and publisher for nearly four years, and continues at Random House, where she was named executive editor and vice president in 2021, but her love of storytelling began decades earlier when she was growing up in front of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves at her parents’ home in Columbia, South Carolina. Having two professors as parents—they both taught at South Carolina State University in Orangeburg as well as at King Saud University in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, among other academic institutions—gave her endless opportunities to witness people taking the written word seriously, and at an early age Wilson was taught to value books. “I was given that education young about how you should treat a precious object in your parents’ home,” she says. “I was taught to respect books.”
The respect extended to her career as a writer. Wilson, the author of eight books for young readers, recalls that when she published her first children’s book, Young, Gifted and Black: Meet 52 Black Heroes From Past and Present (Wide Eyed Editions, 2018), her mother gave her the first book she had made as a kid—her mother had saved it for all those years. “It was a book that I made with ribbons and staples and paper clips when I was about five,” Wilson says. “It was about what you would expect: unicorns, dragons, Black mermaids. I was traveling across borders and across galaxies. But I just remember thinking, ‘Wow, that is precious to me that she kept this, that she believed in this. It’s not something frivolous, but something meaningful that I had a sense of purpose at that age, and she believed it.’”
That sense of purpose led her to American University, where she received a BA in communications, and to New York University, where she earned her master’s degree in humanities and social thought. She has been vice president of programs at the Women’s Media Center; a storyteller for TED Conferences; the executive director of Women, Action, and the, an online magazine for teenagers; and myriad other roles at the intersection of media and activism.
