A’Lelia Bundles is an engaging public speaker and skilled MC, who brings warmth, intelligence, humor and a strong grasp of current events and history to her presentations.
Author and journalist A’Lelia Bundles writes biographies about the amazing women in her family: entrepreneur Madam C. J. Walker and Harlem Renaissance icon A’Lelia Walker. She also speaks at conferences, colleges, corporations and other venues about entrepreneurship, philanthropy, financial literacy and women’s and African American history. She is at work on her fifth book, The Joy Goddess of Harlem: A’Lelia Walker and the Harlem Renaissance, about her great-grandmother whose parties, arts patronage and travels helped define the era.

After a 30-year career as an executive and Emmy award-winning producer with ABC News and NBC News, she now is brand historian for MCJW, a line of hair care products inspired by Madam Walker and created by Sundial Brands. She is a trustee of Columbia University and chair emerita of the National Archives Foundation. On Her Own Ground, her biography of Madam Walker, is a New York Times Notable Book and the non-fiction source for the fictionalized four-part Netflix series that will air in early 2020.

She founded the Madam Walker Family Archives and is on the advisory boards of the March on Washington Film Festival, the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America at Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute and the Smithsonian’s American Women’s History Initiative.

She is a graduate of Harvard College and Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and has participated in writing residencies at Yaddo and MacDowell.

Content: A’Lelia Bundles

Photo: Indiana University