A’Lelia Bundles is the author of Joy Goddess: A’Lelia Walker and the Harlem Renaissance (June 2025 Scribner), about her great-grandmother whose parties and arts patronage helped define the era.
She has written four nonfiction books about her entrepreneurial great-great-grandmother, including On Her Own Ground: The Life and Times of Madam C.J. Walker, a New York Times Notable Book, a BCALA Honor Book and a Hurston/Wright Finalist and recipient of the Association of Black Women Historians' 2001 Letitia Woods Brown Prize for the best book on Black women's history. This biography also inspired “Self Made,” the four-part Netflix series starring Octavia Spencer. A former network television news executive and producer at ABC News and NBC News, she is a former vice chairman of Columbia University’s Board of Trustees, a former chair of the National Archives Foundation board and on the advisory boards of the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America at Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute, the March On Film Festival and Columbia Global Reports.