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Rachel Sams is an experienced writer, editor, manager and leader taking on a career transformation after 20 years in business journalism. In 2022 she joined the Nonprofit Risk Management Center as a consultant and staff writer and took on an assignment as audience engagement director for nonprofit news outlet Searchlight New Mexico.

She most recently was editor-in-chief of business journal Albuquerque Business First. As editor, she led the newsroom in creating a “Reinventing Our City” series and event on how to reinvent Albuquerque’s economy. The project won ABF a coveted finalist spot in the Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing awards. She joined ABF in 2009 as associate editor.

Previously, Sams was a reporter at the Baltimore Business Journal and the Tallahassee (Fla.) Democrat. While at the BBJ, her reporting on the disciplinary records of Maryland stockbrokers received a first-place investigative reporting award from the Maryland-Delaware-D.C. Press Association.

She fell in love with journalism as an intern at her hometown paper, the Greenwood Commonwealth of Greenwood, Mississippi. She is a proud graduate of the Mississippi School for Mathematics and Science and Johns Hopkins University.

She previously served as secretary of the Journalism and Women Symposium and vice president of membership development for the Society of Professional Journalists Rio Grande Chapter.

She lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where she bikes, hikes, practices yoga and writes fiction and poetry.