Gallatin Grad Student Wins Fellowship to Write Biography of Four Blues Queens
Thulani Davis, a graduate student in the Gallatin School, has won an inaugural Leon Levy Center for Biography Fellowship to pen a group biography of four blues queens: Ma Rainey, Ethel Waters, Alberta Hunter, and Bessie Smith.
Davis received one of the four $60,000 fellowships awarded by Leon Levy Center for Biography, which was recently established at The City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center.
Davis won a 1992 Grammy Award for Best Album Notes for her work on Aretha Franklin's "Queen of Soul" album. She has authored two novels, Maker of Saints and 1959, as well as two nonfiction works, My Confederate Kinfolk and Malcolm X: The Great Photographs. Davis is the librettist for three operas: Amistad; X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X, with Anthony Davis; and The E & O Line, with Anne LeBaron. Her play, "Everybody's Ruby: Story of a Murder in Florida," premiered in 2001 at the New York Shakespeare Festival.
Davis has previously won a Lila Wallace-Readers Digest Writer's Award, a PEW Foundation National Theatre Artist Residency, and a Charles H. Revson Fellowship.
The Leon Levy Center for Biography examines the practice and methodologies of biography and aims to foster discussion about the nature of biography and its legitimacy as a scholarly pursuit.