Veronica Chambers

Veronica Chambers is a prolific author, best known for her critically acclaimed memoir Mama’s Girl and the New York Times Bestseller Yes Chef, which was co-authored with chef Marcus Samuelsson.

In 2012 Yes Chef won the prestigious James Beard literary award and was on the New York Times’ bestseller list for more than two months. In 2014, she co-authored her second New York Times bestseller, Everybody’s Got Something with GMA host, Robin Roberts.

Veronica’s upcoming collaborations include Wake Up Happy with award-winning morning TV host and NFL Hall of Famer Michael Strahan.

The New Yorker called Veronica’s own memoir, Mama’s Girl, “a troubling testament to grit and mother love … one of the finest and most evenhanded in the genre in recent years.” It has been course adopted by hundreds of high schools and colleges. Born in Panama and raised in Brooklyn, she writes often about her Afro-Latina heritage.

Veronica’s personal book projects reflect her curiosity, her passion for travel, and her love of children. Her non-fiction books include Kickboxing Geishas: How Japanese Women Are Changing Their Nation and The Joy of Doing Things Badly: A Girl’s Guide to Love, Life and Foolish Bravery.

She’s been a top editor at Glamour, Good Housekeeping, and Newsweek, among other magazines. In 2012 and 2013, she developed and launched Latina magazines for Conde Nast and Hearst.

She has also written more than a dozen books for children, most recently the critically acclaimed Celia Cruz, Queen of Salsa and the body confidence young adult novel Plus. Her teen series Amigas is being developed for MTV with Jennifer Lopez attached as executive producer.

Veronica spent two seasons as an executive story editor for the CW network’s hit series Girlfriends and earned a BET Comedy Award for her writing on the show. She has also written and developed projects for Fox and the N. Veronica has contributed to several anthologies including the best-selling Bitch in the House, edited by Cathi Hanuaer and Mommy Wars, edited by Leslie Morgan Steiner.

In 2014, Veronica Chambers and her husband, Jason, launched the Loud Emily scholarship, in honor of Emily Fisher, Veronica’s mentor in philanthropy. The Loud Emily scholarship provides full tuition for two girls to the Willie Mae Rock Camp for Girls in New York. The girls are chosen on the basis of essays and short creative videos that explain how and why they rock out for the causes they believe in.

A graduate of Bard College at Simon’s Rock, Veronica and her husband have endowed three scholarships at the college in the fields of music and literature. She has been the recipient of several awards including the Hodder fellowship for emerging novelists at Princeton University and a National Endowment for the Arts fiction award.

She speaks, reads and writes Spanish, but she is truly fluent in Spanglish. She lives with her husband and daughter in Hoboken, New Jersey.