A’Lelia Bundles is the author of On Her Own Ground: The Life and Times of Madam C.J. Walker, a New York Times Notable Book about her entrepreneurial great-great-grandmother. Her fifth book, Joy Goddess: A’Lelia Walker and the Harlem Renaissance — a biography of her great-grandmother, whose parties, arts patronage, and international travels helped define that era — will be published on June 10, 2025 by Scribner.
A’Lelia is the founder of the Madam Walker Family Archives, the largest private collection of Walker photographs, memorabilia and ephemera.
She is a former vice chair of Columbia University’s Board of Trustees and former board chair of the National Archives Foundation. She is a member of several boards that reflect her interest in history, journalism, political activism, social justice, the arts, and historic preservation including the March On Film Festival, the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women at Harvard Radcliffe Institute, Woodlawn Conservancy, GANGGANG, Indiana Landmarks, Columbia Global Reports, and Indianapolis’s ReThink 65/70 Coalition.
A’Lelia worked in network television news for thirty years, first at NBC News where she was a producer for news and magazine programs, and then at ABC News where she was a World News Tonight producer, Washington, DC deputy bureau chief and director of talent development.
Her articles and essays have been published in the New York Times Book Review, Variety, TheUndefeated.com (now Andscape.com), Al Jazeera, Parade, Ms., O Magazine, Essence, several encyclopedias and books. As a speaker and emcee, she has appeared at universities, corporations, and book festivals, as well as on ABC, CBS, MSNBC, NBC, NPR, PBS, and BBC. She has served as an advisor for numerous documentaries, museum exhibits, biographies, scholarly papers, and history texts.
Her book, On Her Own Ground, received the Association of Black Women Historians’ 2021 Letitia Woods Brown prize for the best book on Black women’s history and was named a Black Caucus of the American Library Association’s Honor Book and a Hurston/Wright-Borders Books Legacy Award finalist in 2021. This deeply researched non-fiction book was the inspiration for Self Made, the fictional four-part 2020 Netflix series starring Oscar-winner Octavia Spencer.
A recipient of an Emmy and a du Pont Gold Baton for her television news work, A’Lelia has participated in writing residencies at Yaddo and MacDowell.
She graduated magna cum laude from Harvard College and received a masters degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. She is a member of Phi Beta Kappa and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
@aleliabundles on Instagram, Threads, BlueSky, X and TikTok.
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