Author of
Love, Rita (HarperCollins, 2025)
The World According to Fannie Davis (Little, Brown, 2019)
Bridgett M. Davis is the author of the memoir, The World According To Fannie Davis: My Mother’s Life In The Detroit Numbers, a New York Times Editors’ Choice, named a Best Book of 2019 by Kirkus Reviews, and featured as a clue on Jeopardy! She is author of two novels, Into the Go-Slow, and Shifting Through Neutral. Davis is also writer/director of the award-winning film Naked Acts, which was recently re-released to critical acclaim. She is Professor Emerita at Baruch College (CUNY) and the Graduate Center, where she taught creative, narrative and film writing. Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the LA Times, among other publications. A graduate of Spelman College and Columbia Journalism School, she lives in Brooklyn with her family.
Bridgett M. Davis
Books by Bridgett
A searing tribute of sisterhood and family, love and profound loss from the acclaimed author of The World According to Fannie Davis.
In Love, Rita, Bridgett M. Davis tells the story of her beloved older sister, Rita, who knew Bridgett before she knew herself. Just four years apart in age, as the two sisters grew into young adulthood, they left behind their childhood rivalry and became best friends. Rita was a vivacious woman who attended Fisk University at age 16, and went on to become a car test driver, an amateur belly dancer, an MBA, and later a popular special ed teacher; in doing so, she modeled for her younger sister Bridgett how to live boldly. And in the face of family tragedy, the two sisters leaned on one another to heal; their closeness grew, until Rita’s life was cut tragically short by lupus when she was just forty-four. This led Bridgett to ask the simple, heartbreaking question: Why Rita?
Love, Rita is a brave and beautiful homage that not only celebrates the special, complex bond of sisterhood but also reveals what it is to live, and die, as a Black woman in America. This moving memoir, full of joy and heartbreak, and family history alongside American history, uses Rita’s life as a lens to examine the persistent effects of racism in the lives of Black women—and the men they love. This poignant, deeply resonant portrait of an unforgettable woman and her impact on those she left behind is essential reading.
PRAISE
This is an elegy, a celebration of a life, and a celebration of life itself. Love and grief are themselves sisters, one the proof of the other’s existence. Bridgett Davis loves out loud, loves like no one is watching— bravely with tenderness, vulnerability, and even humor. The complexity, audacity, and tenacity of sisterhood are strands braided into this unforgettable memoir. --Tayari Jones, author of Leaving Atlanta
Love, Rita is on one level a personal tribute to a lost sister, but its scope is wider, looking at illness as a collective accumulation spanning back centuries. This book made me think in new ways about all we carry in our bodies - those of us who survive and those who don’t. Achingly beautiful, truthful and deep.-- Danzy Senna, author of Caucasia and Colored Television
Bridgett Davis is a master at weaving together family history and social commentary. Love, Rita is another triumph in her creative oeuvre. Part love letter, part elegy, it reveals the power of Black women’s bonds and joy practices. It hums a soothing numeric melody, even as it wrestles with the aches of chronic illness, grief, and the failures of the U.S. healthcare system. A poignant, tender meditation for our turbulent times. You must read this book.--Tanisha Ford, author of Our Secret Society: Mollie Moon and the Glamour, Money, and Power Behind the Civil Rights Movement
Bridgett M. Davis has given us an exquisitely rendered look at sisterhood from her perch as the only living sibling from her family of five. Love, Rita mines universal themes of sibling rivalries and shared caregiving duties, but Davis importantly infuses her memoir by investigating the widespread effects of "weathering," detailing the ways our unequal justice and medical systems disproportionately harm Black bodies. I didn't want this book to end.— Beth Macy, author of Dopesick and Raising Lazarus
In her memoir Love, Rita, Bridgett M. Davis brings together the sharp eye of a journalist and the tenderness of a sister and daughter to trace the tangled throughline of joy and tragedy that runs through her family. The book is at once a love letter as well as an indictment of the countless ways American society, particularly the health-care system, has failed Black Americans.— Linda Villarosa, author of Under the Skin: The Hidden Toll of Racism on American Lives
Bridgett Davis offers an intimate lesson in Black American grief and sisterhood in Love, Rita. Using her family's story to illustrate research that shows how racism ends Black lives early, Davis deftly illuminates how this grim knowledge only sharpens grief's edge—and her loss.—Tracie McMillan, author of The White Bonus: Five Families and the Cash Value of Racism in America
Love Rita is a beautiful and heart wrenching exploration of the relationship between wound, history, inheritance, and disease. In this story of Black sisterhood, familial love and devotion are proven to be the Grace notes of our existence. Everyone who lives with or is impacted by chronic disease should read this book.—Ava Chin, Author of Mott Street
Love, Rita is a loving homage to a sister and a fiercely intelligent meditation on what it means to exist in America as a Black woman. It is a tribute to family, and an unflinching reckoning with historical trauma. Bridgett Davis has written a book that must be read by everyone who has ever loved, and lost, and come to discover again the unbreakable bonds of sisterhood. I could not put it down.—Maaza Mengiste, author of The Shadow King, finalist for the 2020 Booker Prize
Whether you are a sister, a caretaker, or any woman, you will find much that is relatable in Love, Rita. Bridgett Davis's loving tribute to her sister, and their complicated relationship, offers deep insight into the world of chronic illness, intergenerational trauma, and family dynamics -- as seen through the lens of a black woman in America. This memoir is honest, empathetic, and searing. What a gift to readers and book clubs.--Pamela Klinger-Horn
Books by Bridgett
The World According to Fannie Davis: My Mother’s Life in the Detroit Numbers is Bridgett Davis’ story of growing up in Detroit in the 1960s and 70s while keeping a huge family secret: the fact that the business her mom ran – the one that brought the family out of poverty and into the middle class – was illegal. Bridgett’s mom, Fannie Mai Drumwright Davis Robinson, was a numbers runner, one of only two women in Detroit to successfully run her own Numbers business; this is a story that has never been told.
As a successful adult, Bridgett found herself still burdened by the weight of that family secret: it meant she could never tell the truth about how extraordinary her mother actually was, that she couldn’t fully answer her children’s questions, or publicly celebrate the fact that her mother, in an era when there were almost no opportunities for African-American women, “made a way out of no way” and managed to not only be a stay-at-home mom to her five children, but ensure that Bridgett got the education and the financial security to grow up to be a journalist, a teacher, a writer and a filmmaker–and a homeowner. She felt the time had come to share her story with the larger world.
Seamlessly weaving together personal history, memoir, interviews and cultural study, The World According to Fanny Davis illuminates the life and life-choices of one unforgettable and unconventional woman, while opening a rare and invaluable window on The Numbers – how it worked, and its significance as a means of African-American economic empowerment, not just for one family but in the culture at large, and offering a rare, insider, African-American perspective on Detroit in its heyday. The World According to Fanny Davis is a moving and unforgettable memoir of an extraordinary parent, living in a unique time and place, as seen through the eyes of an admiring yet clear-sighted daughter. This is a memoir that, while revealing the secrets, triumphs and tragedies of one unique family, also shines a light on underrepresented aspects of the American experience.
PRAISE
"The World According to Fannie Davis is a daughter's gesture of loving defiance, an act of reclamation, an absorbing portrait of her mother in full. Blending memoir and social history, [Davis] recounts her mother's extraordinary story alongside the larger context of Motor City's rise and fall."―Jennifer Szalai, New York Times
"Davis's heartwarming memoir honors her remarkable mother, who made a good life for her family in the '60s and '70s."―New York Times, Editor's Choice
"A rich and heartwarming memoir honors a remarkable mother....We need more stories like Fannie's-the triumph and good life of a lucky black woman in a deeply corrupt world."―New York Times Book Review
"The novelist and teacher illuminates the life of her iron-willed mother, who in the 1960s and '70s spearheaded
Detroit's shadow economy (through an illegal lottery known as "The Numbers") in order to bolster both her family and the city's burgeoning black middle class."―O,Oprah Magazine Reading Room
"The author candidly and poignantly transports readers to her formative years in Detroit, where her mother, Fannie, successfully ran numbers-- right from the family's dining room table-- with class, determination and dignity to spare."―Bridgette Bartlett Royall, Essence Magazine
"The book blends memoir with the compelling social history of the numbers, a lottery game that operated outside of the law but very much inside the context of African-American life and culture."―Kate Tuttle, The Boston Globe
"The story of Fannie Davis, as her daughter so thoroughly tells it, is the story of not just one woman, in one city, at one period in time; it is, in many ways, the story of black America, the resilience and solidarity of the marginalized."―Entertainment Weekly
"Novelist Bridgett M. Davis turned to nonfiction in what started out as the story of her mother...But this memoir turned out to be much more: a panorama of African-American communities in this era, the resolve they demonstrated and the restrictions put upon them in their pursuit of the American dream. It's a family story of nationwide scale."―David Canfield, Entertainment Weekly
"Bridgett M. Davis draws a loving portrait of her unforgettable mother who gamed the system and won. Davis is a witness to the journey of the African American strivers of Detroit, but she is also a witness to the evolution of her own remarkable family history. Combining rigorous research with an insider's access, The World According To Fannie Davis is a triumphant tale of female empowerment. Bridgett Davis' love letter to her mother lights a bold new path, because sometimes leaning in is not enough."―Tayari Jones, author of An American Marriage