Gallatin Grad Student Wins Fellowship to Write Biography of Four Blues Queens

Thulani Davis, a graduate student in the Gallatin School of Individualized Study and adjunct instructor in the Rita & Burton Goldberg Department of Dramatic Writing in the Tisch School of the Arts, has won an inaugural Leon Levy Center for Biography Fellowship to pen a book on four blues queens: Ma Rainey, Ethel Waters, Alberta Hunter, and Bessie Smith.              

      Davis received one of the four $60,000 fellowships awarded by the Leon Levy Center, which was recently established at the City University of New York Graduate Center and aims to foster discussion about the nature of biography and its legitimacy as a scholarly pursuit.

      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 non-fiction 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.

—James Devitt