Alice Randall tells untold stories. The story of Black Bottom, the Black Detroit neighborhood that once rivaled and eclipsed Harlem as the engine of Black artistic elegance and economic progress before it was destroyed in her most recent novel Black Bottom Saints. The story of Cynara, an imaginative and entrepreneurial beige woman. excluded from the pages of Gone with the Wind but celebrated in the pages of Randall’s New York Times bestselling novel The Wind Done Gone. The story of a Black spy family featured in Rebel Yell. The story of how fish and foraged berries became the quintessential celebration meal of Africans enslaved in these Americas, embedded in the NAACP Award winning cookbook Soul Food Love. The story of Black and white Jazz luminaries surviving the great Depression by playing the Black and white coal camps of West Virginia in a groundbreaking podcast. The stories of Black cowboys on the western frontier, animating so many of her songs. The lost story of the first family of Black Country that anchors her memoir, My Black Country.

Randall seeks and sees invisible triumphs, and transforms them into novels, songs, cookbooks, screenplays, lectures, podcasts, and sometimes single recipes, rooted in her experience as a Black woman who migrated from Motown to Music City.

A graduate of Harvard University, she holds an honorary doctorate from Fisk University and currently serves as the Andrew W. Mellon Chair in the Humanities on the faculty of Vanderbilt University. She published her first major feature length article forty-four years ago at the age of twenty-three. Today at sixty-seven she is an award-winning songwriter, award-winning screenwriter, award-winning novelist, award-winning cookbook writer, and an award-winning children’s literature author and the only Black woman in history to write a number one country song (for Trisha Yearwood) and an Academy of Country Music Video of the Year (for Reba McEntire). Telling essential untold stories and nurturing has been her life work. She is a griot. And she nurtures a next generation of storytellers. This is her legacy.