Joy Reid

Joy-Ann M. Lomena-Reid (born December 8, 1968), known professionally as Joy Reid, is an American journalist and television host.

Reid graduated from Harvard University in 1991 with a concentration in film studies.

In 1997, Reid married Jason Reid, who later became a documentary film editor.

The couple has three children.

Reid began her journalism career in 1997, leaving New York and her job at a business consulting firm to begin working in South Florida for a WSVN Channel 7 morning show.

She left journalism in 2003 to work with the group America Coming Together to oppose the Iraq War and President George W. Bush.

Reid was a 2003 Knight Center for Specialized Journalism fellow.

From 2006 to 2007, Reid was the co-host of Wake Up South Florida, a morning radio talk show broadcast from Radio One's then-Miami affiliate WTPS, alongside "James T" Thomas.

She later returned to broadcasting as a talk radio host and worked on Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign.

She served as managing editor of The Grio (2011–2014), a political columnist for Miami Herald (2003–2015), and the editor of The Reid Report political blog (2000–2014).

In a 2013 interview, Reid recalled that her college experience was a quick immersion into a demographically opposite place from where she lived, from a community that was eighty percent African American to a community that was six percent African American.

She had to learn to live with roommates and people who were not her family.

She paid her own bills and tuition while at Harvard and said it was a good learning and growing experience overall.

Her previous anchoring credits include The Reid Report (2014–2015) and AM Joy (2016–2020).

The New York Times described Reid as a "heroine" emerging from the political movements and protests against Donald Trump.

From February 2014 to February 2015, Reid hosted her own MSNBC afternoon cable news show, The Reid Report.

The show was canceled on February 19, 2015, and Reid was shifted to a new role as an MSNBC national correspondent.

Reid is the author of the book Fracture: Barack Obama, the Clintons, and the Racial Divide, published by HarperCollins on September 8, 2015.

In 2015, Reid gave the inaugural Ida B. Wells lecture at Wake Forest University's Anna Julia Cooper Center.

She has written three books: Fracture: Barack Obama, the Clintons, and the Racial Divide (2016), The Man Who Sold America: Trump and the Unraveling of the American Story (2019), and Medgar and Myrlie: Medgar Evers and the Love Story That Awakened America (2024).

Reid was born Joy-Ann Lomena in Brooklyn, New York City.

Her father was from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and her mother a college professor and nutritionist from Guyana.

Her parents met in graduate school at the University of Iowa in Iowa City.

Reid was raised Methodist and has one sister and one brother.

Her father was an engineer who was mostly absent from the family; her parents eventually divorced and her father returned to the Congo.

She was raised mostly in Denver, Colorado, until the age of 17, when her mother died of breast cancer and she moved to Flatbush, Brooklyn, to live with an aunt.

Beginning in May 2016, Reid hosted , a political weekend-morning talk show on MSNBC, and was a frequent substitute for other MSNBC hosts, including Chris Hayes and Rachel Maddow.

In 2016, The Hollywood Reporter said she had the "ability to break down complex issues in a way that makes them digestible and accessible."

In 2016, she received the Women's Media Center's Carol Jenkins Visible and Powerful Media Award.

In 2017, Reid ranked fourth among Twitter's top tweeted news outlets and most tweeted journalist at each outlet.

The Daily Dot credited her in August of that year with coining the term KHive for supporters of Kamala Harris.

In late 2017, and again in April 2018, Twitter user @Jamie_maz reproduced posts written between 2007 and 2009 on Reid's former blog Reid Report which, as The Nation described it, "us[ed] the trope of gay sex to mock politicians and journalists."

Following criticism, Reid apologized, calling the posts "insensitive, tone-deaf and dumb."

As of 2018, Reid's morning show on Saturdays averaged nearly one million weekly viewers.

In 2018, The New York Times stated that "Ms. Reid, the daughter of immigrants, has emerged as a 'heroine' of the anti-Trump 'resistance'."

In 2018, Reid was nominated for three NABJ Salute to Excellence Awards.

One for her segment where a pastor is pulled to safety at the Charlottesville white nationalist march, for Reid's reporting on the damage caused by the hurricanes to the US Virgin Islands and lastly for the segment that won her an award Tragedy of 'Time: The Kalief Browder Story' where Reid sat down with Kalief's brother Deion Browder and filmmaker Julia Mason.

She is a national correspondent for MSNBC and is best known for hosting the political commentary program The ReidOut since July 2020.

In July 2020, MSNBC announced that Reid would host The ReidOut, a new Washington-based weeknight commentary show in the 7 p.m. Eastern time slot vacated by the March 2020 retirement of Hardball host Chris Matthews, making her cable's first Black female primetime anchor.

Reid also teaches a Syracuse University class in Manhattan exploring race, gender, and the media.