California-native Danyel Smith chronicles the lives of artists and athletes via journalism, memoir, fiction, podcasting, and cultural discourse. She’s the author of Shine Bright: A Very Personal History of Black Women in Pop, and creator/host of Black Girl Songbook, a Spotify Original podcast that centers the stories of Black women in music.
A contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine, Smith is a Stanford University John S. Knight fellow (2014), and a 2021 Yaddo fellow. She was editor of Billboard, editor-in-chief of VIBE, and has shared her thoughts on culture in spaces such as the Library of Congress, the Grammy Museum, Yale, the University of Southern California, and New York University.
Smith has been in conversation with legendary figures including Whitney Houston, Lena Horne, Janet Jackson, Mariah Carey, SZA, Gladys Knight, Usher, George Clinton, Simone Biles, and Beyoncé. According to the New Yorker, “Danyel is one of the nation’s most astute chroniclers of pop and hip-hop culture.”
While at MacDowell, Danyel was at work on new memoir projects, including an exploration of her partial Southeast Asian heritage, and an account of ‘90s music magazine culture.
