Legacy and Voice: A Tribute to Valerie Boyd

“Both Alice and Valerie are daughters of Georgia. I remember watching an interview that she did with Alice Walker at Emory, and just how comfortable the two of them seemed together. So that relationship was such a special relationship.”

“I consider Valerie Boyd a Zora for our generation. Though [she was] the definitive biographer of Zora Neale Hurston . . . she still believed there was room for someone else to do another biography.”

“She helped us see ourselves as Black women, and did it with such beauty . . . [and] we really got to bathe in the beauty of [it].”

“In Wrapped in Rainbows, she wrote something about Zora that I think is so relevant to her own identity. She said black writers should have the same freedom as white writers.”

“It wasn’t just the mechanics of it. She was concerned with the deeper truth you were trying to express, and if that truth had anything to do with black people and black women, Valerie was just fully engaged.”

“I’ve been thinking about Valerie all day and all week . . . part of the reason for that is that she is and continues to be someone who developed far beyond what people in my community expected us to.”