She was editorial director of NYT Global at The New York Times, and the West Africa bureau chief for the same publication, based in Dakar, Senegal, from 2005 to 2009.

She was editor-in-chief of HuffPost from 2016 to 2020,[3] after which she spent about one year between 2021 and 2022 as the head of content for Gimlet Media.

[7] In 2006, she received a George Polk Award in Foreign Reporting from Long Island University for her coverage of ethnic violence in the Darfur region of Sudan.

Some of her work in N’Djamena was illustrated by the French freelance photographer Benedicte Kurzen.

[14] Rejecting rigid binaries, she identifies as both Black and mixed race; as both American and African; as a woman, though her masculine gender expression often leads people to assume she is a man; and as a lesbian, though she has also had heterosexual romantic relationships.