Chanté Griffin

Chanté Griffin is an independent journalist whose work centers race, culture, and faith. She’s a former contributing writer for The Washington Post, Faithfully Magazine, The Root, and LA Weekly. Her articles, essays, and interviews have appeared in more than fifty publications including The Huffington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Ebony, Good Housekeeping, Parents Magazine, Vogue.com and PBS SoCal. 

In 2021 she became a fellow with the California Arts Foundation to pen her first solo book project, Loving Your Black Neighbor As Yourself: A Guide to Closing the Space Between Us, which was a NAACP Nominee for Outstanding Literary Work - Instructional. Chanté is a U.S. 2022-2023 Rosalynn Carter U.S. Fellow for Mental Health Journalism Fellow and a Higher Ed Media Fellow through the Institute for Citizens & Scholar (Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation).

Chanté’s 2019 article “How Natural Black Hair at Work Became a Civil Rights Issue” published in JSTOR Daily, provided a comprehensive history of anti-natural Black hair laws in the U.S. The trailblazing article has been cited in law journals and legal cases for the Virginia Law Review, Harvard Journal of Law & Gender, and the ACLU of Connecticut. Today it is a part of the diversity curriculum for Chicago Public Schools and is a trusted resource used by teachers and social justice organizations throughout the country. 

Chanté is the co-author of Having Our Say: Black Voices On Working In Higher Education, published by the Higher Education Recruitment Consortium in 2020. She is also the author of “Jessi on the Margins: Black Characters Then & Now,” an essay that explores how race is portrayed in children’s literature in the 1980s and ‘90s. This thoughtful and personal essay was published in Literary Hub and the anthology, We Are The Baby-Sitters Club: Essays and Artwork from Grown-up Readers, by Chicago Review Press in 2021. The project’s precursor was a 2019 article she penned for The Washington Post, “Beyond ‘Peter Pan” and ‘Baby-Sitters Club’: How (and why) to find more diverse books.”

Prior to Chanté’s career in journalism, she served as a university chaplain at UCLA and USC.

Because Chanté believes that the arts can ignite social change and soul transformation, she co-leads Spirit & Scribe, an online workshop that explores the intersection of writing craft and spiritual formation. In her free time, she enjoys praying, pretending she’s a cast member on Dancing with the Stars. Connect with her via Substack: Loving Your Black Neighbor.