Ryan Lenora Brown

Ryan Lenora Brown is a freelance reporter and an Africa correspondent for The Christian Science Monitor.

Her reporting interests skew long, narrative, and offbeat, with a particular interest in women, migrants, and cities. She has reported from nearly two dozen countries on the continent, and, in addition to The Monitor, she has been published in The Washington Post, The New York Times Magazine, Runners World, Newsweek, The Atlantic CityLab, ForeignPolicy.com, The Daily Beast, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Al Jazeera, U.S. News and World Report, and The Guardian, among others.

She was the runner-up for the 2021 Overseas Press Club of America’s Madeline Dane Ross Award for reporting “showing a concern for the human condition,” the winner of the 2019 Society of Professional Journalists Award for online deadline reporting, and she has been shortlisted for the One World Media and True Story awards.

From 2015 to 2018, Brown was a fellow with the International Women's Media Foundation's Africa Great Lakes Reporting Initiative. She is also also a former Fulbright fellow to South Africa (2011-12), an International Reporting Project fellow to Sierra Leone (2016) and Senegal (2017), a Wits China-Africa fellow to Lesotho (2016), and a Kathryn Davis Fellow For Peace at the Middlebury Language Schools (2019).

Brown's first book, A Native of Nowhere: The Life of Nat Nakasa, which chronicles the life and untimely death of a young South African writer, was published by Jacana Media in September 2013.

She holds a master's in African studies from the University of Oxford and a bachelor's in history from Duke University. She is originally from Denver, Colorado. She lives in Johannesburg, South Africa, with her three dogs.