Valerie Boyd, the author of Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston, is arts editor at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

A founding officer of the Alice Walker Literary Society and a member of the National Book Critics Circle, Boyd has a bachelor's degree in journalism from Northwestern University and an MFA in creative nonfiction writing from Goucher College.

Boyd founded EightRock, a cutting-edge journal of African-American arts and culture, in 1990. In 1992, she co-founded HealthQuest: The Publication of Black Wellness, the nation’s first nationally distributed magazine focusing on African-American health.

Her articles, essays and reviews have appeared in Ms. magazine, Book,The Oxford American, Creative Nonfiction, The Washington Post, Emerge, African American Review and elsewhere.

For her work on the Hurston biography, she was awarded a 1999 fellowship from the George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation of Brown University.