Thulani Davis is an interdisciplinary artist who has written poetry, novels, plays, and screenplays. As described on the poet’s website, Davis’s work in all genres “shares a passionate concern with history, justice, [and] African American life and is marked by the journalist’s eye for the uncovered truth.” Her poetry collections include Playing the Changes (1985) and All the Renegade Ghosts Rise (1978).

Raised in Virginia during the 1950s, Davis wrote a memoir, My Confederate Kinfolk: A Twenty-First Century Freedwoman Discovers Her Roots (2006), that explores her family’s racial history during the Civil War era. In addition to poetry publications, Davis’s writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Nation, Bomb Magazine, Quarterly Black Review, and Ms.

A Village Voice staff member for over a decade, Davis is an  Buddhist minister and the first female recipient of a Grammy Award for liner notes. She is a graduate of Barnard College and has pursued graduate studies at the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University, and New York University, where she has taught in the Department of Dramatic Writing.

Books by Thulani Davis

1959: A Novel

by Thulani Davis

It's the summer of 1959 and Willie Tarrant of Turner, Virginia, is twelve and being groomed to be sent in the first wave of integration. Before this can happen, though, eight black college students, wearing suits and fresh haircuts, go into the Woolworth's lunch counter -- changing everything.