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Join poet/editor/professor of Africana Studies Melba Joyce Boyd (along with several Penn student poets) for a collective reading from and discussion of Boyd's striking new anthology, Abandon Automobile: Detroit City Poetry 2001.
5 PM, Monday, January 28, 2002
at the Kelly Writers House, 3805 Locust Walk
This program is jointly sponsored by the Kelly Writers House and the Center for the Study of Black Literature & Culture.
Melba Joyce Boyd is the author of six books of poetry: Cat Eyes and Dead Wood, Song for Maya, Thirteen Frozen Flamingoes, The Inventory of Black Roses, Letters to Che and Me, The Province of Literary Cats (2001). She is the co-editor of Abandon Automobile: Detroit City Poetry 2001 (Wayne Sate University Press, 2001). In 1994, Wayne State University Press published her bio-critical study of a nineteenth century poet-activist, Discarded Legacy: Politics and Poetics in the Life of Frances E. W. Harper, 1825-1911 which has been widely reviewed and acclaimed. In 1996, Boyd completed a documentary film, The Black Unicorn: Dudley Randall and Broadside Press.
Her poetry, which has been translated into German, Italian and currently into Spanish, and her essays, which deal with the complexity of identity in the African American experience, have appeared in academic and cultural journals, as well as in anthologies in the U.S. and Europe. She served as the Assistant Editor at Broadside Press (1972-77) and she has also published over 20 articles on African American literature, film, and the discipline of African American Studies. In the 1983-84 academic year, she was a Senior Fulbright Lecturer at the University of Bremen in Germany. Similarly, she has given lectures and poetry readings throughout the U.S. and Europe.
She received a B.A.(1971) and a M.A.(1972) in English from Western Michigan University and a Doctor of Arts in English from the University of Michigan (1979). She has held professorial positions at the University of Iowa, Ohio State University, and the University of Michigan-Flint, where she was the Director of the African American Studies Program, and adjunct professor at the Center for Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. She is currently Professor and Chair of the Department of Africana Studies at Wayne State University and an Adjunct Professor for the Center for Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan, where she teaches film. She is the co-editor for the African American Life Series of the Wayne State University Press, where she also serves on the Advisory Board.