ONLINE: Thulani Davis

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Thulani Davis

Thulani Davis is an author and assistant professor in the Department of Afro-American Studies at UW-Madison.

Thulani Davis examines a decade's worth of jazz, soul and punk in her latest book, Nothing But the Music, a collection of documentary poems authored between 1974 and 1992 on artists such as the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Bad Brains, MFSB, Henry Threadgill and many more. Davis, a scholar, author, poet, playwright and assistant professor at UW-Madison, will discuss the book with author and journalist Barry Singer in a livestream hosted by A Room of One’s Own.

media release: A Room of One's Own welcomes poet and historian Dr. Thulani Davis, author (most recently) of Nothing But the Music, for a virtual event on Crowdcast with fellow author Barry Singer!

The sounds of late ’70s and ’80s east coast avant-garde jazz, soul, and punk rock are well documented, but in Nothing but the Music Thulani Davis gives us something beyond, delivering a collection of synesthetic, transportive documentary poems that breathe anecdotal and impressionistic life into a sonic-social history about which most can only speculate. Davis’ verse takes free flight with its muses, scatting and leaping off the page and the shoulders of the musicians, nightclubs, and choreographers she chronicles in these poems. Her odes both to recorded music and its sacred spaces of spirited encounter are at once a paean to ephemeral flashes of embodied experience and a work of preservation. Davis remembers to remember the raw feelings, smoke, dawn drunks, and impulsive energy of her moment, without forgetting its inscription into a broader political urgency. Written between 1974 and 1992, these poems are the most anthologized pieces of Davis’ work, having appeared in numerous collections of writing on black music, here finally assembled for the first time.

Thulani Davis (b. 1949) is an interdisciplinary artist and scholar whose work includes works of poetry, theater, journalism, history, and film. Her engagement with African American life, culture, and history is distinguished by poetic economy, passionate musicality, and an investigative concern for justice. She is the author of the novels 1959 and Maker of Saints, several works of poetry, and the forthcoming book The Emancipation Circuit: Black Activism Forging a Culture of Freedom (Duke University Press). She is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Wisconsin.

Barry Singer writes extensively about the arts and has been a regular contributor to The New Yorker, New York magazine, The New York Times Magazine, Opera News and, for more than a decade, The New York Times Arts & Leisure section, writing about theater, musical theater and popular music. He has blogged about the arts, literature and Winston Churchill for Huffington Post and has written about theater and music for Playbill.