A’Lelia Bundles presents the Joy Goddess
Date: July 30, 2025
​Time: 4:00PM
Location: Francine Kelly Gallery at Featherstone Center for the Arts
Fee: free

A’Lelia Bundles will discuss her new book, Joy Goddess, and share the scintillating story of the pioneering glamour and cultural patronage of her great-grandmother, after whom she was named, the hair-care heiress and Harlem Renaissance socialite A'Lelia Walker.  
 
Born in 1885, A'Lelia spent her early years in poverty until her mother, washerwoman Sarah Breedlove, refashioned herself as Madam C.J. Walker, purveyor of the Wonderful Hair Grower and the first female self-made millionaire in America. 
 
Bringing A'Lelia out from under her mother's shadow (during her lifetime she faced down unfavorable comparisons to her mother's business acumen, and the two had a contentious "fire and ice" relationship), Bundles shows that the heiress had a "gift" for" creating distinctive events" that "surprised even blasé New York." 
 
A'Lelia hosted landmark soirées at her inherited Westchester County mansion and founded both the Walker Salon, "one of Harlem's most popular venues for private parties," and the Dark Tower, a cultural salon named after a Countee Cullen poem "where her downtown friends joined her uptown friends." A'Lelia's guests, cutting-edge musicians, artists, and poets to high-ranking African Americans in the federal government, created a potent and unprecedented cultural mix. Langston Hughes called A’Lelia the “joy goddess of Harlem.”
 
Both Joy Goddess and Bundles’ biography of her great-great- grandmother, Madam C. J. Walker, On Her Own Ground will be available for sale and signing at this very special event hosted by the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, the Cottagers, Inc., and Featherstone Center for the Arts.

A’LELIA BUNDLES is the author of New York Times Notable Book and bestseller On Her Own Ground: The Life and Times of Madam C. J. Walker, a BCALA Honor Book, a Hurston/Wright Foundation Legacy Award finalist and the Association of Black Women Historians’ Letitia Woods Brown Prizewinner. A former ABC News Washington, DC deputy bureau chief and an Emmy Award and du Pont Gold Baton-winning television news producer, she participated in residencies at Yaddo and MacDowell while writing Joy Goddess.

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