Janice Rhoshalle Littlejohn is an award-winning journalist, essayist, author, and screenwriter. A Trojan alumna, Janice has a Master of Professional Writing degree from USC and a Bachelor of Arts in Communication Arts from Loyola Marymount University (LMU).
Her LMU Magazine cover story, “Crowning Achievement,” exploring race-based hair discrimination, is a L.A. Press Club’s 2022 SoCal Journalism Awards finalist (Race & Society). She was a finalist in the Austin Screenwriter Awards and the DreamAgo Plume y Pellicule international Screenwriting Atilier. Her documentary project, “…but can she play?”: Blowing the Roof Off Women Horn Players and Jazz, has been twice recognized by Black Women in Jazz and the Arts Awards for raising awareness on the stories of jazzwomen instrumentalists.
Co-author of Swirling: How to Date, Mate, and Relate Mixing Race, Culture, and Creed (Atria/Simon & Schuster), Janice is also a contributor to Emmy Award-winning artist James Gayles’ anthology Reflections: A Collaboration Between Painting and Literature (Pochino Press), and editor of All About the Benjamins: Helping People Create Sustainable Wealth in the Midst of Financial Insanity by Melanie D. Perry.
She is a Fellow of the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Foundation, Anaphora Literary Arts and the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities. She currently oversees administrative operations for the Institute as Associate Director and is an Adjunct Instructor at USC Annenberg’s Specialized Journalism graduate program.
Janice also serves as a regular facilitator and panelist for USC’s Race, Equity, and Wellbeing, a campus-wide initiative to help leverage the collective knowledge of faculty, staff and students to advance the community’s understanding of, and ability to speak with each other about race, equity, and well-being for greater social impact within and outside of the university.