Today we’d like to introduce you to Amber D. Dodd.
Amber D., we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
When it comes to writing: In the third grade, I literally wrote a sentence for a Language Arts assignment and said “Damn…I’d like to do this more!” The rest is literal history. Attending Chesapeake Science Point Public Charter School, a STEM school, English wasn’t the focus. When I went to pursue my journalism degree at Mississippi State, I took a few Latin classes for my foreign language requirements and which turned into me completing every Latin and Greek course offered. Add in some nonfiction, poetry and fiction classes and voila, my independent relationship with language, grammar and prose is born.
During the pandemic lockdown, I’d read every single thing I could in my home, while also adding magazine subscriptions like Essence, Vogue, and Harper’s Bazaar. I’d go through these pieces of literature and highlight words I didn’t know yet and hawk them down in my dictionary through a weekly series called Word Wednesday. My first job as an editor was for Howard Magazine. I curated one magazine edition for hip-hop and wrote and edited six magazine editions. I became an editor after people trusted me to edit their essays and put together curations of different writers. Now, six years since graduating college, I am a bicoastal award-winning journalist with international published pieces in the United Kingdom and featured in a book in Germany, a nonfiction short story competition win, a grand gold medal for my hip-hop magazine curation, and a beautiful array of friendships, colleagues, writers and editors who make me who I am today.
As DJ Ekletik, I became a DJ because I love hip-hop. She is my first love. I became a writer because hip-hop’s pillars of lyricism and activism showed me how important it is to express yourself and the ways you do it in. Misogyny aside, and still considered, hip-hop is my life; Missy Elliot and her unapologetic eccentricism, while talking about reeboks and classic Adidas, got me into shoes and into my creative individuality. The music videos and their glamour and glitter had me wanting to hit the club that was not going to let 8-year-old me in, but I loved the tension of storytelling and aesthetics. I love spicy debates on hip-hop albums, beefs, the whole nine. I started DJing in high school, but I didn’t have turntables. I simply stayed a music lover throughout college since my authorship took center stage. By 25, I dedicated nearly 15 years to writing and I realized I still had an itch for DJing. I was presented with another chance after my client-turned-mentor, DJ Uncle Chase asked me to do an editorial consultation for a potential website to teach kids how to DJ. One of the greatest feelings is knowing you’re comfortable enough in one art form enough that you can dabble into another! So, in January 2024, I asked if he would mentor me in a set of monthly sessions.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
Whew. Nothing in life worth having comes easy. There were some long nights along the way. Walking home in the rain nights. Crying myself to sleep nights. Frustratingly failing my AP Lang essays. Arguments with my inner self about where I wanted to go and who I wanted to be. Trying to figure out how to make the sound in my DJ equipment work. Forgiving myself over and over while I try to chase my dreams while I missed out on family time and friendships.
My roughest, toughest moments were living in Spokane as a Racial Equity Reporter. The food was disgusting. The Black people I had been hired to cover were very untrusting and anti-Black. White supremacy was rampant. Quiet, but rampant. It messed with your psyche if you weren’t grounded. (The P in Pacific Northwest stands for Passive.) It was lonely. It was hard. It was mockery. But I knew if I were to battle and continue being the best reporter I could be, I would earn a journalism experience that no one could take away from me and carry me for the rest of my career. (Supervisors would tell me “Tough it out for another year or so and you can go anywhere in journalism, even the New York Times. Dangling that wouldn’t work– I had worked there for a post-grad opportunity!)
I never gave up. I wrote the hard things, asked the tough questions, stood up for the people of color I wrote about that were getting trampled by traditional journalism and its white, bias standards by my white editors. I opened up to my editors who brushed me off. My resilience carried me during one of the darkest times of my life. And that’s what separated me from who I was, who I became, and who I’m still becoming today.
Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
I am a storyteller whose work focuses on contextualizing Black America. I specialize in first-person narratives, whether as a nonfiction writer recounting my own coming-of-age tales and lessons learned or recording others and their experience as a journalist that prefers feature stories that grant you access into a deeper layer of someone. Outside of my bright, warm personality, I’m more known for my journalism reporting, but I am most proud of my curations in both journalism and DJing. I believe music can speak to you in a way words alone cannot. So, to have a stronghold on both concepts, I am extremely proud of my endurance, my passion, my ambitions being fortified, and my work ethic that continues to keep me sharp and afloat.
My view point of life is what sets me apart from others. Being born in Baltimore, raised in a non-public school and the Black suburb of Seven Oaks, a girl whose parents hail from Mississippi and Baltimore, my life has been enriched with anomalies that create a distinctive, sharp lens that helps me identify, empathize with and understand others. I love my sense of curiosity. Growing up in a science environment, I question everything and find all the answers I can too. I am not curious because I’m a journalist, I’m a journalist because I’m curious!
Some of my proudest moments are some of the things I’ve covered in journalism. For instance, I beamed with pride when I got to write about Lonnie Spruill Jr., the last living founder Iota Phi Theta Fraternity, Inc., the history of slavery and barbeque, Beyonce’s revolution of country in Black American history through her work with COWBOY CARTER, and other topics that embody my thesis of contextualizing Black America.
I am most proud of my curations and my editorship. Once additional skills to my journalism career, they have now eclipsed my writing and reporting. I love how my editorship connects me to so many amazing people and their ideas, especially how I bring their concepts and projects to fruition.
Who else deserves credit in your story?
I first must show love to Cheryl Coward, my WNBA editor for four years. She taught me how to write and report on a granular level; we even used to go through my stories with the “passive sentence detector,” her keen eye! Cheryl believed in me and fortified my potential both as a reporter and as a woman. One of my other biggest supporters is Stephaine Beans, a birth rights advocate and Black maternal health leader in Spokane, WA. Stephaine leads through a healing-centered lens and, as a Black woman, she always encouraged me to care for myself as the important work I did around race would drain and deteriorate me. In that same vein, I want to give my utmost respect and honor to the Indigenous tribes of Washington state and Idaho, who taught me what true healing, community, eldership and gatekeeping really looks like. The Spokane Tribe saved me so many times over and I thank them for the exchange of reporting on their lives and saving mine. Carolyn Lamberson was my BEST editor and she will always be good in my book for uplifting me, protecting me, and setting me straight as her writer in Spokane. She was a white woman who knew she had much to learn about race, as I did about journalism.
I will never forget Adam Minichino, my editor at the Commercial Dispatch while I was a college reporter my senior year at Mississippi State. He did not have to sit me down one afternoon and show me how to record sports team stats OR how to be a better reporter. He could’ve gave up on me but he fortified my potential and that is something I will always thank him for.
I also have to give love to my late radio show boss, Wayne “The Voyce” Matthews, who got me comfortable with my voice as a halftime reporter and showed me the ropes of sports journalism which in turn prepared me for life. I know he is resting well and many miss him.
My biggest cheerleaders today have been my fellow DC creative community members: Steven X, Nisho Soul, and Lef, a rapper I covered in December who opened doors for me. I also want to give love to my DJ mentor, DJ Uncle Chase. We bicker, but he has never led me astray in the music world.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://amberddodd.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/amb.inc/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amberddodd
- Twitter: https://x.com/amb4mayor
- Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/poetic_artistry
