Kiratiana Freelon

Kiratiana Freelon is a travel expert, Olympic and Paralympic Games enthusiast and the author of Kiratiana’s Travel Guide to Black Paris: Get Lost and Get Found. Her digital efforts in travel recently landed her on Black Enterprises’s list of Top Black People to Follow on Twitter. In a valiant effort to merge her travel and digital lives, she will soon be publishing an ebook, Kiratiana’s Travel Guide to Multicultural London just in time for the 2012 London Olympic and Paralympic Games.

Kiratiana first caught the travel bug as a 20 year-old student studying abroad in Munich, Germany. Her weekend trips to places like Florence, Prague and Paris left her with a desire to explore the rest of the world. After graduating from Harvard University with an Economics degree, Harvard fulfilled her travel dream by blessing her with a $20,000 travel fellowship that took her across West Africa, throughout Brazil and back to Europe. Unsatisfied traveling just for the selfish pleasure of enriching herself, she set out to write a fun, cultural travel guide to encourage more people to explore different cultures through travel. The result was "Kiratiana’s Travel Guide to Black Paris."

She has lived in France, Germany and Brazil and has traveled to more than 25 countries. She has written for Jet Magazine, The Grio, BlackAtlas.com, Bonjourparis.com and maintains her own travel website, KiratianaTravels.com. She has been featured in the New York Times, Black Enterprise, the Chicago Defender, NABJ Digital blog, Black Web 2.0 and many more. She also served as the editor of BlackAtlas.com, a social media travel site sponsored by American Airlines. As a sought out speaker, she has presented at South by South West (SXSW), Blogalicious, and the Alliance Française of Chicago.