Saturday, October 31 | 2 PM
Central Library | 500 McKinney St, 77002 | 832-393-1313
Join us for an afternoon of activities and a visit from author and scholar, Valerie Boyd, as the 8th Annual Books on the Bayou.
Zora Neale Hurston scholar Valerie Boyd will discuss and sign copies of her book Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston. Valerie Boyd is the Charlayne Hunter-Gault Distinguished Writer in Residence at the University of Georgia.
Valerie Boyd is an Associate Professor and the Charlayne Hunter-Gault Distinguished Writer in Residence at the Grady College of Journalism at the University of Georgia, where she teaches narrative nonfiction writing, as well as arts and literary journalism. She also has taught creative nonfiction in the graduate writing program at Antioch University in Los Angeles.
An accomplished journalist and cultural critic, Valerie is the former arts editor at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and she has been published in numerous anthologies, magazines and newspapers.
She founded EightRock, a cutting-edge journal of black arts and culture, in 1990. In 1992, she co-founded HealthQuest, the first nationally distributed magazine focusing on African-American health.
Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston—the first biography of Zora Neale Hurston in 25 years—was published to wide critical acclaim. It was hailed by Alice Walker as “magnificent” and “extraordinary”; by The Washington Post as “definitive”; by the Boston Globe as “elegant and exhilarating”; and by the Denver Post as “a rich, rich read.”
For her work on Wrapped in Rainbows, Valerie received the Georgia Author of the Year Award in nonfiction as well as an American Library Association Notable Book Award. The Georgia Center for the Book named Wrapped in Rainbows 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.
Valerie is currently finishing her next book, Spirits in the Dark: The Untold Story of Black Women in Hollywood, which will be published by Knopf. She lives in Atlanta.