In addition to writing an acclaimed biography, she encouraged a generation of young writers, predominantly women of color, to pursue careers in nonfiction.
Valerie Boyd, who wrote a landmark biography of the novelist Zora Neale Hurston and later, as a 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 on Feb. 12 in Atlanta. She was 58.
Her brother Timothy Boyd said the cause was cancer.
Ms. 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 an associate professor at the University of Georgia.
There she built a narrative nonfiction program designed to open doors for women and people of color, bringing in writers like John T. Edge and Melissa Fay 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.’”
Ms. 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 like criticism, essays and biography. Even while she worked at The Journal-Constitution, her writing spilled over into the pages of magazines like 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 Ms. 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 on 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 was survived by another brother, Michael, who died on Friday.
It was as a freshman at Northwestern that Ms. Boyd first read Ms. 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 Ms. Hurston’s biography.
Every year Eatonville, Fla., where Ms. Hurston grew up, held a festival in her honor, and in 1995 Ms. 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.
Ms. 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 Ms. 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, Fla., both to be closer to Ms. 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 Ms. Boyd’s depth of research and her sure-footed tour through Ms. 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. Ms. Hunter-Gault was one of the first two Black students at the University of Georgia, and in 2007 Ms. Boyd was named the Charlayne Hunter-Gault writer in residence at the university’s Grady College of Journalism.
After leaving The Journal-Constitution, Ms. 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, Miss., and run at the time by Mr. Edge, and she 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,” Mr. Edge said. “She’s spun this kind of web, and a whole bunch of us got pleasantly stuck in it.”
She also became friendly with another great admirer of Ms. Hurston, the novelist Alice Walker. Over the last several years Ms. Boyd worked closely with Ms. 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.
