Thulani Davis

Thulani Davis is an interdisciplinary scholar and artist who has written poetry, novels, plays, and screenplays. She earned a BA from Barnard College and a PhD in American Studies from New York University, where she has taught in the Department of Dramatic Writing. As described on the poet’s website, Davis’s work in all genres “shares a passionate concern with history, justice, [and] African American life and is marked by the journalist’s eye for the uncovered truth.” Her poetry collections include Playing the Changes (1985) and All the Renegade Ghosts Rise (1978).

Raised in Virginia during the 1950s, Davis wrote a memoir, My Confederate Kinfolk: A Twenty-First Century Freedwoman Discovers Her Roots (2006), which explores her family’s racial history during the Civil War era. Davis’s writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Nation, Bomb Magazine, Quarterly Black Review, and Ms.

A Village Voice staff member for over a decade, Davis is a Buddhist minister and the first female recipient of a Grammy Award for liner notes. Her numerous other honors include a Lila Wallace-Readers Digest Writers Award, a PEW Foundation National Theatre Artist Residency, a Charles H. Revson Fellowship on the Future of New York City, the First Annual Legacies Award for Achieving Unparalleled Excellence in the Arts from the New York Coalition of One Hundred Black Women, and an induction into the Black Writers Hall of Fame.

She teaches in the African American Studies department at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.