Professor Valerie Boyd: The Master of Fine Arts Program, and the Alice Walker Visit

Valerie Boyd, the Charlayne Hunter-Gault Distinguished Writer in Residence at the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication, has had an extraordinary career as a narrative non-fiction writer. Boyd was the arts editor at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and worked as a journalist for almost two decades before becoming a UGA professor in 2004.

Over the past five years, Boyd has been working with Nate Kohn, Ph.D., of the Grady College of Journalism to design one of the first Master of Fine Arts programs based at a school of journalism. Recently, she experienced one of her “biggest career highlights here at UGA” when Grady launched the new Low-Residency MFA Program in Narrative Nonfiction and Screenwriting. Boyd serves as the director of the narrative nonfiction track with Dr. Kohn directing the screenwriting track. “We have some amazing, nontraditional students from all over the country who are doing us proud,” says Boyd.

She has been curating and editing the journals of Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Alice Walker to create “Gathering Blossoms Under Fire: The Journals of Alice Walker,” to be published by Simon & Schuster in 2017. Walker will visit UGA as the inaugural Delta Visiting Chair for Global Understanding and will speak at the UGA Chapel on Oct. 14, where she will give a talk and read from her literary works. On Oct. 15, Boyd joins Walker onstage at the Morton Theatre in downtown Athens for “A Conversation With Alice Walker.”

View UGA’s full Focus on Faculty piece on Valerie Boyd here. 

More information on Alice Walker’s visit can be found here.