Leslie Gray Streeter

Leslie Gray Streeter is a columnist excited about telling Baltimore stories — about us and the things that we care about, that touch us, that tickle us and that make us tick, from parenting to pop culture to the perfect crab cake. She is especially psyched about discussions that we don’t usually have. Open mind and sense of humor required. When she was a sophomore at Baltimore City College High School in the ’80s, she met her first newspaper columnist and thought, “Wait? They’ll pay you to write about your opinions? Sign me up!” And since then, that’s all she has wanted to do, and mostly all she has done. She went from City to the University of Maryland and then up and down the East Coast until she found herself as the lifestyle columnist for The Baltimore Banner. It’s a perfect circle, and honestly she’s directing the emotional movie montage in her head right now. There’s a lot of Janet Jackson in it. At The Banner, she wants to build on the expertise she has gained as a staffer at The Miami Times, The York Dispatch and The Palm Beach Post, with freelance gigs including writing for The Washington Post, opining about grief for O, The Oprah Magazine and recapping “The Bachelorette” weekly for The Seattle Times. That’s a lot of ground to cover, but as a features writer and columnist for almost 30 years, she has learned that we, as humans, cover a lot of ground, too, so what we read should, too. We are what we care about, eat, watch, listen to and gab online about, and it means even more when it’s about where we live. And that's what her column is. She is the author of one book, the memoir “Black Widow,” and an international speaker about grief, culture, parenting and a lot of other stuff. She is also a widowed single mom of one son named Brooks Robinson, because they’re really, really, really from Baltimore, which they returned to in July 2020. She is a very slow run-walker, a fan of true crime documentaries and podcasts, and a bad guitarist who sings loud over the chords she can’t reach.