Valerie Boyd, an essayist and nonfiction writer, published Wrapped in Rainbows, a biography of Zora Neale Hurston, in 2002. Only the second complete biography done on Hurston, Wrapped in Rainbows won the Georgia Author of the Year Award in nonfiction, an American Library Association Notable Book Award, and the Southern Book Award for 2003. Currently an associate professor and the Charlayne Hunter-Gault Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at the Grady College of Journalism at the University of Georgia, Boyd is finishing her current book, Spirits in the Dark: The Untold Story of Black Women in Hollywood, to be published this fall. A graduate of Northwestern University, Boyd is the former arts editor at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and received her MFA in creative nonfiction from Goucher College. Her work has appeared in Step Into a World: A Global Anthology of the New Black Literature, Ms., Paste, The Oxford American, Essence, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Creative Nonfiction, African American Review, The Scholar, and Feminist Online as well as other publications.
Loyola’s Modern Masters Reading Series is sponsored by the Center for the Humanities and the department of writing. For more information on the series, visit www.loyola.edu/modernmasters, or contact 410-617-2228.