A’Lelia Bundles is the author of Joy Goddess: A’Lelia Walker and the Harlem Renaissance (Scribner, 2025)—the first major biography of her great-grandmother—and a 2026 Anisfield Wolf Award finalist. On Her Own Ground: The Life and Times of Madam C.J. Walker (Scribner, 2001), a New York Times Notable Book about her great-great-grandmother, was the nonfiction inspiration for a fictional Netflix series starring Octavia Spencer. She founded the Madam Walker Family Archives, the largest private collection of Walker photographs and ephemera. During a thirty-year career in network television news, she first was a news and magazine producer at NBC News, then a World News Tonight producer, Washington, DC deputy bureau chief, and director of talent development at ABC News.

She is a former vice chair of Columbia University’s Board of Trustees and former board chair of the National Archives Foundation. She serves on several nonprofit boards that reflect her interests in history, journalism, social justice, the arts, and historic preservation including the March On! Festival, the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women at Harvard Radcliffe Institute, and Columbia Global Reports.

A recipient of an Emmy and a du Pont Gold Baton for her television news work, she is a member of Phi Beta Kappa and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.