A vibrant, deeply researched biography of A’Lelia Walker—daughter of Madam C.J. Walker and herself a central figure of the Harlem Renaissance—written by her great-granddaughter.

Dubbed the “joy goddess of Harlem’s 1920s” by poet Langston Hughes, A’Lelia Walker, daughter of millionaire entrepreneur Madam C.J. Walker and the author’s great-grandmother and namesake, is a fascinating figure whose legendary parties and Dark Tower salon helped define the Harlem Renaissance.

After inheriting her mother’s hair care enterprise, A’Lelia would become America’s first high profile black heiress and a prominent patron of the arts. Joy Goddess takes readers inside her three New York homes—a mansion, a townhouse, and a pied-a-terre—where she entertained Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Paul Robeson, Florence Mills, James Weldon Johnson, Carl Van Vechten, W.E.B. DuBois, and other cultural, social and intellectual luminaries of the Roaring Twenties.

Now, based on extensive research and Walker’s personal correspondence, her great-granddaughter creates a meticulous, nuanced portrait of a charismatic woman struggling to define herself as a wife, mother, and businesswoman outside her famous mother’s sphere. In Joy Goddess, A’Lelia’s radiant personality and impresario instincts—at the center of a vast, artistic social world where she flourished as a fashion trendsetter and international traveler—are brought to vivid and unforgettable life.

BIO

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 former ABC News Washington, DC, deputy bureau chief and an Emmy Award–winning producer, she participated in residencies at Yaddo and MacDowell while writing Joy Goddess. Visit her website at ALeliaBundles.com or on Instagram at @ALeliaBundles.

REVIEWS

"Joy Goddess is a remarkable biography. A'Lelia Bundles brings A’Lelia Walker’s story to life with such grace, clarity, and beauty. By shedding new light on Walker’s extraordinary life, Joy Goddess enriches our understanding of the complexities of race, gender, and class during the Harlem Renaissance.”—Dr. Keisha N. Blain, co-editor of the #1 New York Times bestseller Four Hundred Souls

"This is a story of Black wealth and talent, and the universals of love, legacy, death, taxes, inadequacy, resilience, and hair—in other words, the things that belie Joy. The life of A’Lelia Walker, though a figure of extraordinary singularity, covers the map from New York to the Midwest to Tuskegee to Paris to Jerusalem and encompasses an equally wide expanse of human experience. The movie script practically writes itself!"—Diane McWhorter, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama, the Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution

"Joy Goddess is a satisfying journey through family dynamics, cultural movements, and the complexities of being a public, known, celebrated Black women like A’Lelia Walker, who many saw, knew, and admired but, as this beautifully written, tightly told story makes clear, few understood. A’Lelia Bundles’ biography is about one woman, but in the telling, becomes a startlingly engaging, vitally important story of an era that you will not want to put down."—Dr. Noliwe Rooks, author of Integrated: How American Schools Failed Black Children

"In this meticulously researched, beautifully written book, A'Lelia Walker emerges from the shadows of the mythology that have long surrounded her. Her biographer, also her great-granddaughter and namesake, A'Leila Bundles is a gifted storyteller who has mined the archive with the astute skill of the best historians, and (like the award winning journalist she is) also has conducted in-depth interviews and reporting, to give us a compelling portrait of a complex, passionate, singular figure and the times she occupied. Walker not only lived through the Harlem Renaissance, she helped to shape it as muse and patron. Joy Goddess has much to teach us about that period and much to teach us about navigating our own. A stellar accomplishment."—Dr. Farah Jasmin Griffin, author of Read Until You Understand

[H]  Scribner Book Company  /  June 10, 2025

1.5" H x 9.1" L x 6.1" W (1.4 lbs) 384 pages