[2][3][4] She serves as an adjunct senior fellow at the Women and Foreign Policy Program with the Council on Foreign Relations[4] and has written the New York Times bestsellers The Dressmaker of Khair Khana (2011), Ashley’s War: The Untold Story of a Team of Women Soldiers on the Special Ops Battlefield (2015) and The Daughters of Kobani: A Story of Rebellion, Courage, and Justice (2021).

Her mother raised her as a single parent in Greenbelt, Maryland,[8][2] her grandmother was Frances Cohen Spielman (died 1999), a World War II veteran of Women's Army Corps and an independent film distributor during the 1940s who later founded First Run Features.

[19] In 2011, Lemmon wrote the first Tina Brown Newsweek cover article, featuring an interview with Hillary Clinton on former Secretary of State's push to put women at the center of U.S. foreign policy.

The story about Kamila Sidiqi, a young Afghan entrepreneur who supports her community under the Taliban rule, was the New York Times nonfiction bestseller.

[23] She is also the author of Entrepreneurship in Postconflict Zones, a 2012 CFR working paper that argues for comprehensive, long-term, collaborative approaches to help entrepreneurs in conflict and post-conflict countries overcome challenges in accessing capital, markets, networks, and business skills training.

[28] In October 2013, Lemmon broke the first media story about how the military could not pay death benefits to fallen soldiers killed in action during the government shutdown.

[34] In September the next year, Lemmon reported on the issue of child and forced marriage in the United States for the PBS NewsHour in a two-part series.

[36][37] The book, Lemmon's second New York Times bestseller,[38] is being made into a film by Reese Witherspoon and Bruna Papandrea, with Lesli Linka Glatter and Molly Smith Metzler attached to direct and write it respectively.