Alexis DeVeaux was born and raised in Harlem. Drawn to the world of words and books from a young age, literature soon became the means by which DeVeaux re-imaged the world. She was strongly influenced by the social movements and black writers of the 1960's. In the early 1970's she joined the writer’s workshop of the Frederick Douglass Creative Arts Center in Harlem, where she won first place in a national black fiction writers’ contest in 1972, and published her first children’s book, Na-ni, and the fictionalized memoir, Spirits in the Street in 1973. By the end of the decade, her reputation as a writer bridged multiple genres: fiction, children’s literature, playwriting, and poetry.
In the following years, DeVeaux’s writing was impacted by the tensions between the Black Arts Movement, an emerging black feminist movement, and the Third World Gay and Lesbian Liberation Movement. In 1980 she published Don’t Explain, an award-winning biography of jazz great Billie Holiday, written as a prose poem. As a freelance contributing editor for Essence Magazine, she penned a number of socially relevant articles, traveling to Zimbabwe, Kenya, and Egypt. She was chosen by the magazine to go to South Africa in 1990 to interview Nelson Mandela upon his historic release from prison, making her the first North American writer to do so. Her 2004 biography of Audre Lorde, Warrior Poet, has received the Gustavus Meyers Outstanding Book Award, the Lambda Literary Award for Biography, and the Hurston/Wright Foundation Legacy Award in nonfiction. DeVeaux is a celebrated writer and activist recognized for her lifelong contributions to a number of women’s and literary organizations.
