doctoral degree; the first was awarded by Morgan
State University. Bontemps died on June 4, 1973;
his funeral was held in the Fisk University Chapel.
After his death, Alexandria, Louisiana, honored
him by restoring his family home and establishing
the Arna Bontemps Museum.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bontemps, Arna W. Black Thunder. New York: Mac-
millan, 1936.
———. God Sends Sunday. New York: Harcourt,
1931.
Bontemps, Arna W. and Langston Hughes, eds. The
Poetry of the Negro, 1746–1949: An Anthology. New
York: Doubleday, 1949.
———, eds. The Book of Negro Folklore. New York:
Knopf, 1958.
Betty Taylor-Thompson
Boyd, Melba Joyce (1950– )
One of the major figures of the Detroit School of
African American poets, which emerged from the
BLACK ARTS MOVEMENT of the 1960s, Melba Joyce
Boyd was born on April 2, 1950, to parents Dor-
othy Wynn Boyd and John Percy Boyd, Sr. Boyd
grew up and was educated in Michigan, receiving
her B.A. and M.A. degrees in English and commu-
nication from Western Michigan University (1971
and 1972) and her doctor of arts (D.A.) from the
University of Michigan (1979).
Boyd has produced a prodigious body of work
since her first book, Cat Eyes and Dead Wood
(1978), which was followed by five other volumes
of poems, including Song for Maya (1983) (pub-
lished in Germany as Lied fur Maya [1989]), Thir-
teen Frozen Flamingoes (1984), The Inventory of
Black Roses (1989), Letters to Che (1996), and The
Province of Literary Cats (2002). Her poetry has
been translated into German, Italian, and Spanish.
Boyd edited, along with M. L. Liebler, Abandon
Automobile: Detroit City Poetry 2001.
In addition to her work as a poet, Boyd is also a
literary biographer. Her first offering in this direc-
tion was Discarded Legacy: Politics and Poetics in the
Life of Frances E. W. Harper, 1825–1911 (1994). An
internationally known poet and novelist, FRANCES
HARPER played a significant role in the abolition-
ist and feminist movements of the 19th century.
Boyd’s pioneering work on this important author’s
novel Iola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted (1892), one of
the earliest best-selling novels by an African-Amer-
ican author, revived research on Harper’s work and
helped restore her to her rightful place along with
William Wells Brown, Martin Delaney, SUTTON
GRIGGS, and BOOKER T. WASHINGTON. Boyd intro-
duces and exposes Harper’s work to a new gen-
eration of readers. As Ann DuCille, writing in The
Women’s Review of Books, observes, “Boyd proves
herself a literary historian of the first order in this
scrupulously researched biography” (15).
In 2003, Boyd published another pioneering
work, Wrestling with the Muse: Dudley Randall and
Broadside Press. As she does in her work on Harper,
in this text Boyd uncovers a neglected but impor-
tant aspect of American and African-American
literary history. DUDLEY RANDALL (1914–2000) was
the founder of the most significant poet’s small
press of the 1960s. The Detroit-based BROADSIDE
PRESS published, over the course of two decades,
some 95 titles and introduced such important
20th-century African-American poets as HAKI
MADHUBUTI, NIKKI GIOVANNI, SONIA SANCHEZ,
AUDRE LORDE, and ETHERIDGE KNIGHT to the read-
ing public. Each poet became an important voice
of the Black Arts Movement. In addition, in 1995
Boyd produced a documentary film on Randall’s
life, The Black Unicorn, which complemented her
published biography. Boyd, a former assistant edi-
tor at Broadside Press, brings firsthand knowledge
and legitimacy to her work on Randall and Broad-
side Press. According to biographer Arnold Ramp-
ersad, Wrestling with the Muse is “a richly creative
exploration” of Randall’s “remarkable life as a poet
and creative visionary.”
In her poetics, Boyd employs a spare, sharp
verse whose vernacular style and generally short
lines are informed by a wide-ranging sensibility
that is rooted in American contemporary urban
experiences. Boyd’s declarative sentences are made
powerful through her jagged, fragmented, style.
Her poems often praise the urban landscape for
just those things that seem most unexpected. TheBoyd, Melba Joyce 67