Danyel Smith — Contemporary Writers Series

Presented by the Mills College at Northeastern University Literatures and Languages Department, the Contemporary Writers Series and We Are The Voices.

This event is free and open to the public, both in-person in the Mills Hall Living Room and virtually via zoom.

Zoom link will be provided day of the reading.

Registration is required.

[Danyel is] one of the nation’s most astute chroniclers of pop and hip-hop culture.— The New Yorker, 2022

Award-winning journalist Danyel Smith is author of the critically-acclaimed Shine Bright: A Very Personal History of Black Women in Pop (One World / Random House, April 2022). Danyel is also creator/host of Black Girl Songbook,  a podcast that centers the sounds and stories of black women (The Ringer/Spotify Original). Danyel’s CV includes being a producer and writer at ESPN, a Knight fellow at Stanford University, an arts fellow at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, and a 2021 Yaddo fellow. She was editor of Billboard,  and the first woman and first black person to serve as editor-in-chief of VIBE. She has written two novels — More Like Wrestling (Crown, 2003) and Bliss (Crown, 2005), and Danyel’s recent work appears in the New York Times Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, and at NPR. Danyel lives in Southern California with her husband. 

Doors will open at 5:00pm with light snacks and drinks and the reading will begin at 5:30pm.