Lauren Foreman was never a star athlete, or an athlete – even though she made many attempts.

“I must’ve tried out for every team out under the sun in high school,” she says. But the 21-year-old Chicago native was shot down every time.

She took each rejection with a grain of salt and moved on to other challenges – such as pursuing a career in journalism.

She’s a recent graduate from the University of Missouri with a degree in convergence journalism.

Foreman has always been a writer of different genres. From performance poetry to essays, using the English language to tell stories is her specialty.

But the road that launched her into the business of journalism started with someone else recognizing her talent as a writer. Her mother, who is a teacher with a “tell it like it is” attitude, saw her daughter’s talent of writing early on.

Foreman brought home her first article, published in her high school paper, and her mother gave it a stamp of approval, she says. That’s all she needed to know that she was headed down the right path.

“My mother is very critical, and I trust her compliments,” she says with a smile. “My mother is a big inspiration for me.”

Foreman remembers seeing her mother pull late nights working on assignments as she balanced school and work while raising her. It’s that kind of perseverance Foreman drew from to succeed in her budding career.

Foreman enjoys writing about culture, lifestyle and art. Her goals include launching a magazine that covers some of the issues African-American women face.

Along the way she knows she’ll continue to face rejection; it keeps her going. Her mantra is, “OK, next tryout.”

– Monique Johnson

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