Biography

Award-winning journalist Danyel Smith is author of the acclaimed Shine Bright: A Very Personal History of Black Women in Pop, and creator/host of the NAACP Image Award-nominated Black Girl Songbook, a Spotify Original podcast that centers the sounds and stories of Black women in music. A contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine, Danyel is a Stanford University John S. Knight fellow (2014), a 2021 Yaddo fellow, and a 2024 MacDowell Fellow. She was editor of Billboard, as well as the first woman and first Black person to serve as editor-in-chief of VIBE. Danyel has written two novels, and appears as an expert on all major networks, in countless documentaries, and has shared her thoughts on culture in spaces such as the Library of Congress, Amazon Music, the Grammy Museum, Yale, the University of Southern California, and New York University. Danyel has interviewed legendary figures from Whitney Houston to Lena Horne to Janet Jackson to Keyshia Cole to Mariah Carey to SZA to New Edition to DJ Premier to Gladys Knight to Usher to George Clinton to Simone Biles to Beyoncé. And according to the New Yorker, "Danyel is one of the nation's most astute chroniclers of pop and hip-hop culture."