Valerie Boyd was an American writer and academic.
21 Facts About Valerie Boyd
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Valerie Boyd was best known for her biography of Zora Neale Hurston entitled Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston.
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Valerie Boyd was an associate professor and the Charlayne Hunter-Gault Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Georgia, where she taught narrative nonfiction writing, as well as arts and literary journalism.
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Valerie Boyd's father operated a gas station and tire shop; her mother was a housewife.
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Valerie Boyd studied at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism, graduating with a Bachelor of Science in 1985.
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Valerie Boyd subsequently undertook postgraduate studies at Goucher College, obtaining a Master of Fine Arts in creative nonfiction writing in 1999.
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Valerie Boyd first worked as a copy editor for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution starting in 1985.
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Valerie Boyd later became a reporter, book critic and line editor for the paper.
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Valerie Boyd founded EightRock, a cutting-edge journal of black arts and culture, in 1990.
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Valerie Boyd eventually became Arts Editor of the Journal-Constitution, a position she held until leaving the newspaper in 2004.
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Valerie Boyd said she felt a strong connection to the author since first reading Hurston's novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, during her freshman year at Northwestern University.
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Valerie Boyd describes her experience as feeling called to the challenge of writing Wrapped in Rainbows when she heard Hurston's first biographer, Robert Hemenway, a white male, speak at the 1994 Zora Neale Hurston Festival of the Arts and Humanities in Eatonville, Florida.
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Valerie Boyd was named Charlayne Hunter-Gault Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at Henry W Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication three years later.
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Valerie Boyd co-founded the Alice Walker Literary Society in 1997, together with Beverly Guy-Sheftall and Rudolph Byrd.
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Valerie Boyd was an elected board member for the National Book Critics Circle.
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Valerie Boyd traveled the United States giving speeches and lectures on the life and legacy of Zora Neale Hurston as a part of the Big Read, a program sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts designed to re-establish reading for pleasure as a popular American pastime.
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Valerie Boyd was named editor-at-large of the University of Georgia Press in 2021.
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Valerie Boyd died on February 12,2022, at a hospital in Atlanta.
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Valerie Boyd was 58, and suffered from pancreatic cancer prior to her death.
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Valerie Boyd received the Georgia Author of the Year Award in nonfiction as well as an American Library Association Notable Book citation for her work on Wrapped in Rainbows.
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Valerie Boyd was inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame in 2021.