Expert Bio

A’Lelia Bundles is the author of On Her Own Ground: The Life and Times of Madam C.J. Walker, the 2001 New York Times Notable Book about her entrepreneurial great-great-grandmother and the inspiration for Self Made, the fictional Netflix series starring Octavia Spencer.  She is at work on her fifth book, The Joy Goddess of Harlem: A’Lelia Walker and the Harlem Renaissance. A former network television news executive and producer at ABC News and NBC News, she is a vice chairman emerita of Columbia University’s Board of Trustees and chair emerita of the board of the National Archives Foundation. She is a graduate of Harvard College and Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.