Thulani Davis

Thulani Davis is a writer and an interdisciplinary artist who creates text in a wide range of forms. Davis grew up in the 1950s in Virginia, where her parents taught at Hampton University. She was educated at Barnard College, the University of Pennsylvania, and Columbia University. In college, she was "schooled" for her first spoken word performance by Gylan Kain and Felipe Luciano of the original Last Poets, and considers them among the many poets of her artistic lineage—a list including Amiri Baraka, June Jordan, Nikki Giovanni, Langston Hughes, Robert Hayden, and many before them. Over the course of Davis’s long and diverse artistic career, she has worked as a performance poet and artist, documentarian, essayist, novelist, and playwright. She is the author of My Confederate Kinfolk (2006), Maker of Saints (1996), which won an American Book Award, Malcolm X: The Great Photographs (1993), 1959 (1992), a novel and nominee for an Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and others. Davis is also the librettist for the operas Amistad (1997) and X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X (1986), which, according to The New Yorker “has brought new life to America's conservative operatic scene, being a work at once genuinely new, musically and theatrically effective, and concerned with matter that, still inflammatory years after Malcolm X's assassination, is kept before us each day in New York's streets....The work is gripping, and it is unlike any other opera.” She has worked as a reporter for the San Francisco Sun-Reporter and an editor for the Village Voice, and co-founded, with Joseph Jarman, the Brooklyn Buddhist Association. At present, she is teaching playwriting part-time at NYU and starting another book.