Upcoming Events

Valerie Boyd (December 11, 1963 – February 12, 2022) was an American writer and academic. She was best known for her 2003 biography of Zora Neale Hurston entitled Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston. It was the first biography of author and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston in 25 years. The Washington Post declared Wrapped in Rainbows “the definitive Hurston biography for many years to come,” and Boyd received the Georgia Author of the Year Award in nonfiction, as well as an American Library Association Notable Book citation for the book. The Georgia Center for the Book named the biography one of the “25 Books That All Georgians Should Read”, and the Southern Book Critics Circle honored it with the 2003 Southern Book Award for best nonfiction of the year. 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.  She was inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame in 2021. Gathering Blossoms Under Fire: The Journals of Alice Walker, was published posthumously in 2022.

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. A native Atlantan, Boyd began her career at the Atlanta Journal Constitution where she later became a reporter, book critic, and line editor for the paper. Boyd founded EightRock, a cutting-edge journal of Black arts and culture, in 1990. Two years later, she co-founded HealthQuest, the first nationally distributed magazine focusing on African American health, and served as its editor in chief.  Boyd eventually became Arts Editor of the Journal-Constitution, a position she held until leaving the newspaper in 2004.  Boyd was named editor-at-large for the University of Georgia Press in 2021.