The University of Georgia Press mourns the loss of celebrated editor Valerie Boyd. In September 2021, the Press appointed Boyd as one of two Editors-at-Large. She also served as one of the Crux: The Georgia Series in Literary Nonfiction series editors.

In February 2021, Boyd moderated the Press’s “Then and Now: A Conversation with Charlayne Hunter-Gault and Calvin Trillin” kickoff of the University of Georgia’s campus-wide read of An Education in Georgia.

Boyd was a professor of journalism and nonfiction writing and the Charlayne Hunter-Gault Distinguished Writer in Residence at the University of Georgia. Founder and director of UGA’s low-residency MFA Program in Narrative Nonfiction, she was the author of the critically acclaimed Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston.

Her recent projects include Gathering Blossoms Under Fire: The Journals of Alice Walker (Simon & Schuster 2022) and the anthology Bigger Than Bravery: Black Writers on the Pandemic, Shutdown and Uprising of 2020 (also 2022). Former arts editor at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, she has published in the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Bon Appetit, Oxford American, Essence and Atlanta Magazine. She was senior consulting editor at Bitter Southerner magazine and served on the board of the Southern Foodways Alliance.

Boyd passed away on Saturday, February 12, 2022.