[3] Her writings have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Post, and The Washington Post, among others.
At The Wall Street Journal, she covered religion, higher education, and philanthropy for the editorial page.
[4] Prior to this assignment, she founded the magazine In Character.
Riley was a blogger for the Chronicle of Higher Education until she was fired in 2012 after writing a blog arguing for the elimination of Black Studies at university departments,[5] which resulted in a social media backlash, kicked off by an essay by Tressie McMillan Cottom[6][7] and a petition demanding her firing, which contained roughly 6,500 names.
[8] She graduated from Harvard College in 1998,[9] magna cum laude.