Beau Jessup has died at 27, and Columbia Journalism School has since published the interview she completed before her death. The school announced her death in a statement dated November 9 and later released the interview on November 11 with her family's permission.
The release gives readers a clearer view of who Jessup was beyond the short announcement: a journalism student in Columbia's Master of Science program who was expected to graduate in May 2027. In the interview, she said, "I want to work as a journalist and writer," and said she hoped to report on people and culture while continuing to write for theater.
Lisa Maxwell, Jessup's mother, had already told her followers in September that her daughter was "over in NYC making us all super proud" after sharing Columbia's photograph of the incoming journalism class on X. Maxwell, a British actress and television presenter, was reflecting on a path that had long been public in small, scattered pieces, from a 2008 interview in which she called Jessup "a little mate to me" to the projects that made her known beyond family circles.
Those projects included SpecialName, the naming service Jessup began during a teenage trip to China and built around a simple formula: parents picked five desired qualities from a list of 12, and the website returned three possible names. She discussed it in her October 2016 TEDxBrighton talk, How I Named 250,000 Chinese Babies, and later estimated in the Columbia interview that it had helped name around one million babies. HELLO! reported in March 2019 that it had helped name more than 677,000 children and earned over £300,000 before Jessup stopped charging for it in 2020.
Her work was broader than that one idea. At 16, she started Beau's Community Bakes, a weekly newspaper column that used recipes to open conversations with older people who were lonely. She studied Social Anthropology at the London School of Economics, then Writing for Performance at Cambridge, where she wrote The Sandbag, a play about family, memory and inherited stories. She was also preparing a New York workshop and hoped to collaborate with actors and directors from across Columbia while she was represented by THORO Artists.
That polished public profile sits beside a harder fact that remains unexplained: Columbia has not disclosed the cause or circumstances of her death. Jelani Cobb called her a "cherished member" of the community in an email to students, and the school said it was working with her family to provide support, but the release of her interview after her death leaves one central question unanswered — what took the life of a 27-year-old student whose plans were still unfolding.
