Born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, Daphne A. Brooks earned her BA in English from UC Berkeley and her PhD in English from UCLA. She also clocked some serious hours rolling through the aisles of Tower Records, Amoeba Records, Rasputin’s and Rhino Records.

Brooks is the author of three books—Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850-1910 (Durham, NC: Duke UP), winner of The Errol Hill Award for Outstanding Scholarship on African American Performance from ASTR, Jeff Buckley’s Grace (New York: Continuum, 2005), and Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2021). She is currently at work on a Black feminist rereading of DuBose Heyward and the Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess as well as a multi-volume study of Black women and popular music culture entitled Subterranean Blues: Black Women Sound Modernity, of which Liner Notes for the Revolution is the first installment.

Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, The Nation, The Guardian, Pitchfork.com, Artforum, Slate, Oxford American Magazine, NPR.org, the Los Angeles Review of Books and other press outlets. Brooks is currently editing an anthology of essays forthcoming from Duke University Press and culled from Blackstar Rising & The Purple Reign: Celebrating the Legacies of David Bowie and Prince, an international 3-day conference and concert which she curated.

She has authored numerous articles on race, gender, performance and popular music culture including “Sister, Can You Line It Out?: Zora Neale Hurston & the Sound of Angular Black Womanhood” in Amerikastudien/American Studies; “‘Puzzling the Intervals’: Blind Tom and the Poetics of the Sonic Slave Narrative” in The Oxford Handbook of the African American Slave Narrative; “Nina Simone’s Triple Play” in Callaloo; and “‘All That You Can’t Leave Behind’: Surrogation & Black Female Soul Singing in the Age of Catastrophe” in Meridians.

Brooks is also the author of the liner notes for The Complete Tammi Terrell (Universal A&R, 2010) and Take a Look: Aretha Franklin Complete on Columbia (Sony, 2011), each of which has won the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award for outstanding music writing, and her liner notes essay for Prince’s Sign O’ The Times deluxe box set was published in fall of 2020.

From 2016-2018, she served as the co-editor of the 33 1/3 Sound: Short Books About Albums series published by Bloomsbury Press. With Professor Brian Kane, she is the co-founder and co-director of Yale University’s Black Sound & the Archive Working Group, a 320 York Humanities Initiative.