A’Lelia Bundles

A’Lelia Bundles is the author of Joy Goddess: A’Lelia Walker and the Harlem Renaissance – the first major biography of her great-grandmother and a 2026 Anisfield Wolf Award finalist – and On Her Own Ground: The Life and Times of Madam C.J. Walker, a New York Times Notable Book about her great-great-grandmother that was the nonfiction inspiration for a fictional Netflix series starring Octavia Spencer. She is the founder of the Madam Walker Family Archives, the largest private collection of Walker photographs and ephemera. During a thirty-year career in network television news, she first was a news and magazine producer at NBC News, then a World News Tonight producer, Washington, DC deputy bureau chief, and director of talent development at ABC News.

She is a former vice chair of Columbia University’s Board of Trustees and former board chair of the National Archives Foundation. Currently she serves on several non-profit boards that reflect her interests in history education, journalism, social justice, the arts, and historic preservation including the March On! Festival, the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women at Harvard Radcliffe Institute, BIO (Biographers International), Indiana Landmarks and Columbia Global Reports.

Her articles have been published in the New York Times Book Review, Variety, O Magazine, Essence, Town & Country, and several encyclopedias. A recipient of an Emmy and a du Pont Gold Baton for her television news work, she is a member of Phi Beta Kappa and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.