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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.

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:

• How can the Internet be used to help people change their lives in spiritually intelligent ways?
• How can the Internet be used to explore the forms and functions of “participatory literature” for the 21st Century.
• How can the Internet be used as a commercially viable medium to publish traditional literature on ideas and people who are missing or misrepresented in world literature.

Davis’ latest novel The Melting Points is a novel of ideas written as an espionage thriller just as Coming Home was a novel of ideas written as a war novel.

A short excerpt of the new novel will be published on the SV Digital Universe portal as a piece of participatory literature; and it will use many of the elements made possible by the unique qualities of Internet publication –sound, music, graphics and hyperlinks to create a unique form of immersive fiction.

Teaching Summary / Contact Professor Davis