Heran Mamo Interview (Billboard)
Heran Mamo is a staff writer at Billboard. She took on that role in December 2020 and has quickly made a name for herself. Her work primarily consists of news articles, but she also writes feature stories, hosts video interviews, and participates in panels for Billboard’s digital events.
How did you get to where you are today, professionally?
Since my parents immigrated from Ethiopia, I learned Amharic as my first language and didn’t grow up speaking English until I was 5 years old. It was hard to keep up with the rest of the American kids in school, and I found storytelling to be a great way for me to pick up the language. A blank Microsoft Word document still excites me to this day because you never know what you’ll end up with by the time you’re done writing. I told my father that my dream was to be an author of books, and he advised me to pick a more lucrative career. So naturally, I picked journalism. [laughs] I took a journalism class senior year of high school that piqued my interest, and that led to me studying journalism at the University of Southern California.
I started out writing for the school newspaper, The Daily Trojan, before becoming the writer and eventually editor of a new student-run online magazine called Neon, where I reported on music and rocket science. (That phrase “It’s not rocket science”? Yeah, I actually know a thing or two about it.) I realized that I couldn’t live without music—I walked to class with my headphones on every day and had a speaker specifically for my shower—and figured if I pursued a job that centered on something that was like a second breath to me, then I would surely wake up every day doing something I love.