Kimberly Seals Allers

Kimberly Seals Allers is an award-winning journalist, five-time author, international speaker, strategist, and advocate for maternal and infant health.

She is the founder of Irth, (as in Birth but without the B for bias), a “Yelp-like” review and rating app for Black women and birthing people from marginalized groups to leave and find reviews of maternity and infant care physicians and birthing hospitals as a tool to address bias and racism in care, which is now in beta testing. In the past year, Kimberly has raised over $500,000 in grants to build Irth, and she currently leads pregnancy, birth and pediatric review collection work in four U.S. cities. Irth, is a project of Kimberly’s non-profit, Narrative Nation, which creates community- centered media and tech to eradicate health disparities.

Kimberly was named one of “21 Leaders for the 21st Century” by Women’s eNews for her media advocacy work for maternal and infant health. She most recently served as editorial director of the Maternal and Child Health Communication Collective, a national consortium of over 80 organizations, working to shift the narrative of maternal and infant health, funded by the W.K Kellogg Foundation.

Kimberly is a leading voice on birth, breastfeeding and motherhood at the intersection of race, class, and policy. Kimberly’s fifth book, The Big Let Down—How Medicine, Big Business and Feminism Under- mine Breastfeeding was published by St. Martin’s Press in January 2017.

For nearly a decade, Kimberly has created and directed innovative community-based projects in New Orleans, Birmingham, Detroit and Philadelphia that explore the impact of “first food deserts”— communities that lack accessible resources to support breastfeeding—and designed community- partnered strategies to transform these areas into more breastfeeding supportive environments.

Kimberly is a graduate of New York University and Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. A divorced mother of two, she lives in Queens, NY. Follow her on Facebook, Twitter and Insta gram: @iamKSealsAllers. Learn more at www.KimberlySealsAllers.com and follow @theIrthApp on Instagram.