‘Orange Is The New Black’ Star Danielle Brooks Announces Pregnancy On Twitter

Danielle Brooks announced she is expecting her first child with a series of posts Tuesday on social media. 

The “Orange Is the New Black” actress teased the exciting news prior to her announcement by tweeting that she planned to share “some exciting news.” 

She later shared a photo of herself with a “20 weeks” sticker placed on her stomach. 

“So happy to announce I’m preggers,” she wrote. “20 weeks in and feeling good!” 

The actress also posted a photo of her holding a positive pregnancy test on Instagram. She received a string of congratulatory messages on Instagram and Twitter. 

Brooks, who has kept her personal life relatively private, will appear as her character Tasha Jefferson, also known as “Taystee,” in the final season of “Orange Is the New Black,” which returns to Netflix on July 26. 

The 29-year-old, who earned a Tony nomination for her portrayal of Sofia in Broadway’s “The Color Purple,” stars in The Public Theater’s production of the Shakespeare comedy “Much Ado About Nothing” in New York City. She also serves as an executive producer of the musical “Ain’t Too Proud – The Life and Times of the Temptations.”

During an interview with The New York Times earlier this month, Brooks talked about her experience as a black woman in an entertainment industry that still struggles with a lack of representation and how she hopes to inspire change. 

“I am such a complex human being and I’m only one of millions of black women, so can we branch out and stop telling the same five black women-type stories?” she said. “I want young people that relate to me to say, Yeah man, I can be the first plus-sized action hero or villain, or I can be in an unconventional rom-com or in a Victorian story.

“So that’s my goal: to give permission to the next generation to say, I am that, I can be that, I can do that. To allow people’s dreams to be bigger than what they could ever imagine.”