Black Authors Festival @SagHarbor 2026 Hostesses

Chantee Lans

Chanteé Lans is a multi-Emmy and Edward R. Murrow award winning reporter and fill in anchor at WABC-TV Channel 7 Eyewitness News. Chanteé was previously a contributing writer for the New York Times.  

Before returning to New York, She was an investigative reporter and evening anchor at the ABC affiliate in Shreveport, Louisiana. Chanteé also reported at CBS in Philadelphia and Boston.

Chanteé has interviewed President Joe Biden. She also covered the Boston marathon bombings, sexual assault trial of Bill Cosby, and the imprisonment and release of Rapper Meek Mill which prompted criminal justice reform in Pennsylvania and across the United States. 

Born in Brooklyn and raised on Long Island, Chanteé earned her Bachelor of Arts degree in broadcast journalism from Temple University. She obtained her master's degree in global development and social justice from St. John's University.

Rochell Sleets

Rochell Bishop Sleets is the Editor and Chief Content Officer at Newsday, where she is responsible for the overall direction, content and quality of the multiplatform newsroom, working closely with Newsday’s award-winning team to provide impactful, differentiated coverage to its diverse audiences.

Sleets was previously the Director of News at the Chicago Tribune, where she was a key leader in restructuring the news department to find innovative approaches to expand and focus coverage, and leverage talent to create high-performing, equitable organizational culture. Her appointment to the masthead in 2020 at the Chicago Tribune made her the news organization’s first Black news director, and in 2024, she became the first Black woman to lead Newsday. Sleets, who joined Newsday in February 2023 as managing editor, launched her journalism career in high school as a Dow Jones scholar at the Asbury Park Press newspaper in her home state of New Jersey.

She has worked in journalism for three decades and has been dedicated to telling the full, fair stories, the joys and the sorrows, of all people. Sleets served as a Pulitzer Prize juror for Local Reporting in 2024 and as chair of the Local Reporting jury this year. Sleets, who has been honored and recognized for her editing work, is also a licensed educator.

As part of giving back to her community and supporting diverse youth and young adults, she has been a tutor and college adviser to students for over a decade, helping them achieve their academic goals and setting them up with the tools they need to help launch professional careers. She currently serves as a faculty adviser for FNewsmagazine at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago.

A first-generation American to immigrant parents from Belize, Central America, Sleets graduated from Howard University in Washington, D.C., with a bachelor’s degree in broadcast journalism and received a master’s degree in teaching from National Louis University in Chicago. She and her husband, Gentry, live in Suffolk County and have four adult children.