11/28/2023
Imara Jones is a twenty-first-century political journalist and transgender activist, located in New York City, whose work has won Emmy and Peabody awards. She attended Columbia University in New York City where she received a Bachelor's degree in History and Political Science. Imara also attended the London School of Economics and Political Science where she obtained a Master of Science and Economics. Having grown up in the South, Georgia, Imara feared her family’s response to her coming out as transgender. She had to leave the South at 18 years old because she felt like she couldn’t be herself, which is why returning home in 2018 brought back some of the anxieties when she first left. Imara documented her trip home through her TransLash Podcast as a way to share her personal experience with finding out about her family’s acceptance of her identity as a trans woman and providing an experience for her platform TransLash Media.
Imara founded a platform called TransLash Media, which is a non-profit journalism and narrative organization. Through this platform, Imara creates content in order to change the current culture of anger and hostility toward transgender individuals in the United States. TransLash Media provides a way for transgender and gender non-conforming individuals to share their stories with the world and shift the cultural understanding of what it means to identify as transgender and gender non-conforming. Imara works to show the people around her, and the world, that transgender individuals exist and have always been here. She focuses on Black trans women because, as Imara put it, “everything generally in society fails Black trans women,” seen through the violence, lack of education, and unemployment that so many Black trans women face daily. Along with TransLash Media, Imara also hosts a TransLash Podcast, which received the 2023 Outstanding Podcast Award from GLAAD, an LGBTQ advocacy organization. In 2022 Imara received an award from the Nationalist Black Journalist Association after she received the Journalist of Distinction Award in the same year. She is the first ever trans individual to receive an award from the Nationalist Black Journalist Association.
