NEW YORK, NY.- Valerie Boyd, who wrote a landmark biography of novelist Zora Neale Hurston and later, as a creative writing professor at the University of Georgia, helped bring diversity to the world of Southern literature by showing a generation of women of color how to make it as journalists and essayists, died Feb. 12 in Atlanta. She was 58.

Her brother Timothy Boyd said the cause was cancer.

Boyd was probably best known nationally for her book “Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston” (2003), which took her almost a decade to write and won widespread critical acclaim.

But she was already well known around the South, especially in her hometown, Atlanta, as both an electrifying essayist and an energizing mentor. She moved into that role full time in 2004, when she left her job as the arts editor at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution to become a professor at Georgia.

There she built a creative nonfiction program designed to open doors for women and people of color, bringing in writers such as John T. Edge and Melissa Faye Greene as instructors and speakers and, most important, building a supportive community that would continue to grow long after her students had graduated.

“If you look at any book of narrative journalism, that kind of thing is typically full of a whole bunch of white men,” Rosalind Bentley, who was among the first students in the program, said in a phone interview. “And here was a woman saying, ‘No, there are other people who have something to say, and I’m going to clear that path.’”

Boyd had been part of a community herself: She got her start among a generation of Black writers who, in the late 1980s and early ’90s, broke into previously white-dominated genres such as criticism, essays and biography.

Even while she worked at the Journal-Constitution, her writing spilled over into the pages of magazines such as The Oxford American and into anthologies.

“She was a really excellent writer, but also someone who valued research and history,” said Kevin Powell, a writer and activist who included a short story by Boyd in “In the Tradition: An Anthology of Young Black Writers” (1992), which he edited with Ras Baraka. “And she valued the culture of the Black community and wanted to represent it in her work in every way possible.”

Valerie Jean Boyd was born Dec. 11, 1963, in Atlanta. Her father, Roger, owned a gas station and later a tire shop, and her mother, Laura Jean (Burns) Boyd, was a homemaker.

She received her undergraduate degree from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University in 1985 and a Master of Fine Arts degree in nonfiction from Goucher College in Baltimore in 1999.

Along with her brother Timothy, she is survived by another brother, Michael.




It was as a freshman at Northwestern that Boyd first read Hurston’s best-known work, the 1937 novel “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” and she quickly became a devotee. But it took another decade before she decided to write Hurston’s biography.

Every year, Eatonville, Florida, where Hurston grew up, held a festival in her honor, and in 1995, Boyd listened to a talk there by one of her previous biographers, Robert Hemenway, a white man. His book had appeared in 1973, and he said that it was time for a new one — and that this time, it should be written by a Black woman.

“I decided I was that Black woman,” she told the Journal-Constitution in 2003.

Boyd had joined the Journal-Constitution in 1985 as a copy editor and later worked as a reporter and editor, even as she plunged into Hurston’s life story. Eventually, though, the demands of the book, and her all-in approach to research and writing, led her to request a leave of absence. When the paper said no, she quit.

She moved to Sarasota, Florida, both to be closer to Hurston’s native grounds and to find the peace and quiet to write. Every Sunday, she would buy a family-size bag of salad greens, enough to provide her lunch during the week, so that she hardly needed to pause during her marathon stretches of writing. At the end of each day, as a reward, she would take a walk on the beach.

When the manuscript was done, in 2002, she returned to the Journal-Constitution as arts editor. She remained there until moving to the University of Georgia.

Critics roundly praised “Wrapped in Rainbows,” especially for Boyd’s depth of research and her sure-footed tour through Hurston’s life and legacy. It won the 2003 nonfiction prize from the Southern Book Awards, given at the time by the Southern Book Critics Circle.

“It’s so easy to read, and yet when you do you know it took her so much to get to that point,” Charlayne Hunter-Gault, herself a pioneering Black reporter, said in an interview.

Hunter-Gault was one of the first two Black students at Georgia, and in 2007, Boyd was named the Charlayne Hunter-Gault writer-in-residence at the university’s Grady College of Journalism.

After leaving the Journal-Constitution, Boyd continued to cultivate relationships among writers, especially writers of color, around the South, and used her position to promote their work. She joined the board of the Southern Foodways Alliance, an organization based in Oxford, Mississippi, run by Edge, and helped create a fund for young writers to tell the stories of underrepresented groups.

“She made a purposeful effort to build, in terms of our program but also in her social networks, this really broad-based and genuinely diverse and equitable community,” Edge said. “She’s on this kind of web, and a whole bunch of us got pleasantly stuck in it.”

Boyd also became friendly with another great admirer of Hurston's, novelist Alice Walker. Over the past several years, Boyd worked closely with Walker on an edited volume of her journals. “Gather Blossoms Under Fire: The Journals of Alice Walker, 1965 to 2000,” will be published in April.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.