After graduating from Colgate University (1961), Davis
entered the United States Air Force, rose to rank of Captain and flew 47
refueling/ reconnaissance missions over Vietnam (1964-68).
He joined The
Washington Post as a reporter and in less than nine months rose to be Day City Editor (1968-69). From the Post he moved to The New York Times as an editor in the Sunday Department (1969-70)
Upon earning a Master of Fine Arts Degree from Columbia University in creative writing and film (1971), he worked as a college professor at The City University of New York (1972 – 79), and at the Newark campus of Rutgers University (1980 – present). He has held adjunct positions at Colgate University, Columbia University and the Yale School of Organization and Management.
As a reporter he wrote numerous articles for The Post and The Times. And as a freelance writer he wrote articles for many local, national and international magazines and newspapers. His feature articles have been translated into more than 30 languages. He has been a contributing editor to Black Enterprise and Essence.
His first novel,
Coming Home (Random
House, 1972), supplied the story upon which the Academy Award winning Jane
Fonda film was loosely based. The novel was judged a Notable Work of Fiction in
1972 by The New York Times Book Review. It was the first major novel about the
Vietnam War.
He has
written five other books including
Black Life in Corporate America
(co-authored, with Glegg Watson, Doubleday, 1982), a national best seller,which
was one of the most widely reviewed books of 1982. It drew invitations to
develop and teach a course based on the
book at dozens of major business
School. Davis accepted a teaching position at the Yale School of Organization
and Management. Despite the success as a business school text, the book is
actually a work of creative nonfiction. Creative nonfiction uses scenes,
dialogue, and other techniques usually employed by poets and fiction writers.
As a research professor at Rutgers University Davis
started the Spiritual Intelligence Action Research Project (SIARP) in the
mid-1990s to explore parallels between claims of science, on the one hand, and
religion, on the other, about how tangible and intangible reality interact. He
has lectured widely on Spiritual Intelligence at places as diverse as SideWalk
University in Memphis and at a joint conference sponsored by the Harvard
Divinity School and MIT Media labs. Once begun The Spiritual Intelligence
Action Research Project affected all his book, his periodical publications
and his teaching.
“George Davis has done extraordinary work as a
teacher, creative writer, and member of the academic community,"
Sterling L. Bland, Jr., Ph.D. Associate Dean of the Graduate School –
Rutgers-Newark
An extremely
versatile author, Davis has written two popular and yet critically acclaimed
books of creative nonfiction short stories on love. When an excerpt of Love,
Black Love (Doubleday 1978) appeared in Essence it garnered the
largest reader response in the magazine’s history. Kirkus Review made
favorable comparisons between Love Lessons (William Morrow
1998) and James Joyce’s Dubliners.
Soul Vibrations (co-authored with
Gilda Mathews) (William Morrow 1996), uses spiritual astrology as a way of
creating a positive view of African-American culture. The book grew out of a
unique use of Spiritual Intelligence research to create a role modeling tool
for Newark school children–a list of, and commentary on, famous African
Americans born on every child’s birth date.
“Alex” (written for Tony Award Winner Ben
Vereen, presently a work in progress), is a musical play based on the SI
research. Its central metaphor is Alex Haley’s historic journey as the only
American ever to trace the “roots” of his family back to the universal tribal
past, back to when we did not know ourselves to be separate from all creation,
where we experienced God as life itself acting all around us, through us, as
each of us.
Presently Professor
Davis is heading up a well-trained, highly-motivated team that is turning their
very popular web site into an affinity web portal. As a portal, the site,
which has been in operation for almost ten years and draws thousands of
visitors daily from 35 nations of the world, will test some of the research
questions of the Spiritual Intelligence Action Research Project. Three of
the dozens of questions are:
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With Branches steps are underway to create a TV series. The story in Branches begins where the spiritual journey in Alex Haley’s “Roots” leaves off. It is a compelling narrative of how the spirits of two Americas --one white and one black-- moved toward one-ness. The book will be published in 2012.
An off-shoot of Branches is the digital project, Barack Obama America, and the World, which begins e-publication during the fall of 2011. It uses our current political debate to illustrate how the world looks when we see it as a movement of spirits.
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Teaching Summary / Contact Professor Davis
