Thulani Davis is a writer and an interdisciplinary artist who creates text in a wide range of forms.

"The most frequent question I am asked, is what it's like to work in various genres. Is it different to write poetry than to write an essay, or a play? My usual answer is no. The experience is the same, but the rules are different. If I am working with a composer over a period of time, I sometimes write with music in my head but that is a very unique experience. I like working with the constraints that each form requires--each one works different muscles in the imagination and demands fresh strategies for composition."

Davis grew up in the 1950s in Virginia, where her parents taught at Hampton University. She attended the Putney School, graduated from Barnard College, and has attended graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia University. In college, she was "schooled" for her first spoken word performance by Gylan Kain and Felipe Luciano of the Original Last Poets, and considers them among the many poets of her artistic "lineage"-- a list including Amiri Baraka, June Jordan, Nikki Giovanni, Langston Hughes, Robert Hayden, and many before them.

In her 20s she was a performing poet, doing gigs with music and with poets such as Ntozake Shange, Jessica Hagedorn, Roberto Vargas, Pedro Pietri, Janice Mirikitani and others. They were all allied with the Third World Artists Collective in San Francisco at one time or another, producing books, concerts, and breaking new ground with books such Third World Women, the first anthology of its kind. She began her newspaper career with a day job as a reporter for the San Francisco Sun-Reporter, which gave her the opportunity to cover the Soledad Brothers trial, the Angela Davis case and to interview figures such as George Jackson, Huey Newton and others.

"Being a poet is the only real foundation for being able to move from prose to theater, or story to opera. Being a poet makes it easy to edit your own articles, to keep cutting the rhetoric even when it sounds really good. Being a poet makes it enjoyable to write a film, which is exquisitely economical--for a prose writer, film could be excruciating. Being a poet is to understand that words can convey ideas and music, but writing in an American voice allows you to play percussion as well."

During the 1970s, Davis performed with an array of musicians including Cecil Taylor, Joseph Jarman, Famoudou Don Moye, Anthony Davis, Ndiko Xaba, Juju, Oliver Lake, Arthur Blythe, and many others. After returning to New York City in the 1970s, she began to work in performance art with Shange, Hagedorn and Laurie Carlos, among others, and did a one-woman show.

Through her brother, filmmaker Collis Davis, she also met many young black filmmakers and began a long-term association with the making of documentaries. The first of these was a radio documentary examining musicians, composers and war, which aired on PBS stations across the country. She went to work at the Village Voice as a proofreader and stayed 13 years, rising to the position of Senior Editor, while continuing to write. Having to work the all-night shift on production days, and going out to see plays and file a review on other nights, kept her on a sleepless schedule that allowed for hearing lots of live music, and seeing lots of theater that became a way of life for some years.

In the 1980s, Davis began to work in longer forms, stretching into major essays, narrative poems, a first novel, and a first opera. She and Joseph Jarman founded the Brooklyn Buddhist Association and began a sangha, that is now a thriving institution. She also began teaching writing part-time at Barnard College. In the 1990s, she continued to moved into more complex work, doing more opera, an oratorio, more film, and another novel, and a full-length play.

Starting in the year 2000, Davis was asked to start another meditation group, which she credits for allowing her an ongoing healing process amidst all the events following the attack in New York on 9-11-01. As City/State editor at the Village Voice, many of the nightmares facing the city and its citizens landed in faxes and phone messages on her desk in the "frozen zone." She walked part of the way home, past street vigils and church services in the first weeks after the attack. But one night she came upon a suicide during rush hour on Park Avenue, which epitomized the despair of the time and forced Davis into serious, sustained meditation practice.

Since that time she has continued leading meditation groups whenever possible, and in her work, has expanded with the opportunity to do several screenplays. At present, she is teaching playwriting part-time at NYU and starting another book.

All of her work shares a passionate concern with history, justice, African American life and is marked by the journalist's eye for the uncovered truth, the verbatim report from the witnesses, and the power of the true facts of human experience.