Valerie's Web

Valerie Boyd was a writer, editor, and teacher whose literary legacy lives on through her written work — and in the artistic community she wove together and inspired. The Bitter Southerner’s senior editor, Valerie died last year but ensured the future of Southern storytelling. Much like the spider in Charlotte’s Web, she showed how encouraging words and positive connections have the power to lift spirits and transform lives.

Story by Josina Guess | Illustrations by Abigail Giuseppe

etaphors never reveal the whole person, but they help. Valerie Boyd seemed like the best kind of spider. Methodical, intentional, focused, a master of craft. When Valerie died from pancreatic cancer in February 2022, I found her reflected in the pages of Charlotte’s Web, E.B. White’s classic children’s book. I also turned to some of the many people who miss her and are thankful for her influence in their lives.

“[Valerie] made a purposeful effort to build — in terms of our program but also in her social networks — this really broadbased and genuinely diverse and equitable community,” John T. Edge told her New York Times obituary writer. “She’s spun this kind of web, and a whole bunch of us got pleasantly stuck in it.”

Edge is a founding member of the Southern Foodways Alliance, host of the TV show “TrueSouth,” and a writing teacher in the low-residency narrative nonfiction MFA program that Valerie founded and directed at the University of Georgia.

I got drawn into Valerie’s web when I saw her interview Alice Walker at the Morton Theatre in Athens, Georgia, in 2015. At the time, Valerie was editing Walker’s journals, and the ease and calm between the two women was palpable. When I met Valerie at a reading in 2019, she invited me to Walker’s 75th birthday party in Eatonton, Georgia, that summer. Soon after, Valerie became one of the core people I turned to when discerning career and life choices. After a long Saturday phone call, I apologized for taking up so much of her time. She assured me that Alice Walker was there for her, and I’d be there for the next generation. Valerie joined The Bitter Southerner team in early 2021 while I was working as managing editor. I learned even more from her attentiveness, intuition, and editing (always in purple). In August 2021, I became a student in her program at UGA, eager to learn even more from a woman who helped me to see my life brimming with possibility. In Charlotte’s Web, Wilbur the pig needed a friend, and Charlotte the spider became more than that. Valerie Boyd’s life and work are infinitely more complex than a fictional spider’s. But the return to a childhood favorite helped me through my grief. Valerie was in my corner. I know I was not the only one.

Many of us, like a pig in a sty, get stuck in our own muddy and dark corners. We wonder: Can I make it as a writer? Do my words matter? Can I avoid being eaten up by my own anxiety? Can I thrive in academia or publishing or any industry and keep my soul intact? Can I avoid being consumed by jealousy and ambition? Can I find community through the isolated work of writing?

Quietly, gently, firmly, adeptly, Valerie heard us, saw us, and told us, in various ways: I like you. Yes, you can do it. We need you and the stories only you can tell.

As I sat to write this, a small spider appeared in the margins of “Tracing Literary Lineage,” a conversation between Valerie and Sejal Shah in the magazine Creative Nonfiction. “I’m the love child of James Baldwin and Toni Morrison; Alice Walker is my favorite auntie; and Zora Neale Hurston is my grandmother,” she told Shah. The spider sat like a living sticky note beside Valerie’s words. I ran to get my phone to take a photo, but when I returned, the spider was gone.

Moni Basu is the new director of the narrative nonfiction MFA program Valerie started at the University of Georgia, but their friendship began in 1990 when they both worked for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “For such a large newsroom, there were so few people of color,” Basu recalled, and they became close friends. The two lost touch for a season when work and family called Basu to Iraq and India and Valerie left the AJC to work on Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston. The two reconnected after Boyd became a journalism professor at UGA. “We talked about everything. We would go out for these dinners, they felt like forever, and the restaurant would be closing down and they would have to kick us out because we lost all track of time.” During those conversations, Valerie shared the challenges of starting a new academic program. “There were a lot of hurdles and she managed to get over them all,” Basu said.

The two went to Jackson, Mississippi, for a Southern Foodways Alliance symposium commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. John T. Edge was excited to see Valerie’s name on the list. He had written Valerie a “fanboy email” after reading her 1999 Oxford American essay about living in Stone Mountain, Georgia. Her writing challenged some of Edge’s assumptions and beliefs, and he was struck by “the surefootedness of her critique.” But they had never met in person. “There she was walking through the door with Moni and there was that kinetic bright beguiling smile, and before she even got into the room, she said, in essence, ‘I’m starting this MFA program, I want you to be one of the mentors,’ and before she finished her sentence, I said yes. It was just pure instinct on my part because I knew her work, I respected her.” Not long after that, the three gathered in Birmingham and Valerie invited Edge and Basu to dream further with her in launching the narrative nonfiction program at the University of Georgia’s Grady College of Journalism. “I was so blown away that she was asking me to be her partner in crime in this. I had to say yes,” Basu recalled.

“One of the ways she spun the web,” Edge told me, “was that she approached you and she approached life like she knew the score. Like she knew that I was going to say yes. Like it was a foregone conclusion in her head and she was able to transfer that foregone conclusion from her head to mine.”

Rosalind Bentley and Valerie bonded as “Zora heads” on the day Bentley interviewed for a job at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Valerie moved to UGA soon after Bentley joined the AJC, but their friendship took root and lasted almost two decades. “She made each individual person feel that they were her best friend,” Bentley said. “And I don’t mean that she did that in an unctuous way. But she tried to look to the beauty in each person and to cultivate and encourage you.” That deep friendship gave Bentley, who is editor-at-large of the Oxford American and deputy editor for Gravy magazine, the strength to say yes to serving as the MFA program’s interim director last year, even as she grieved the loss of Valerie.

Bentley was in the inaugural class and described how magical her first week felt as a student in Valerie’s program. “Coming out of a newsroom can be a pretty brutal experience. It can toughen you up but can also mess with your confidence. … I just remember breaking into tears at the mid-break. I was by myself in the room, and Valerie saw me and came and sat with me and just put her arm around me. She said, ‘Why are there tears?’ and I said, ‘I just didn’t think this would happen for me, I didn't think I would feel this way. I didn’t think I would have another chance.’ And, as usual, she was like, ‘You got this! You were made for this. It’s happening, it’s real. Let’s do this.’”

KaToya Ellis Fleming, assistant professor of publishing arts at the University of North Carolina Wilmington (UNCW) and editor of Lookout Books, had a similar experience. Fleming refers to her younger self as “just a girl with a notebook and a dream.” But after she started graduate school, the doubts crept in. “I don’t know that I belong here,” Fleming told Valerie.

“Of course you do!” Valerie said to her nervous student. “You have a talent.” Valerie assured Fleming, “You don’t see it, but I see it.” “Every time I have ever doubted myself since that moment, I always think, ‘No, you’ve got this.’ She helped me tear down the boundaries I had put up for myself. I say without irony and without hyperbole, I do not think I would be where I am without her.”

Fleming had to repeat that to herself as she worked to complete the final edits and publication of Bigger Than Bravery: Black Resilience and Reclamation in a Time of Pandemic. The anthology was Valerie’s brainchild, and Fleming was honored that her teacher brought it to a press where students learn about book publishing by engaging in the process. In a sad testament to the beauty of teaching legacies, Philip Gerard, one of the founding directors of the creative writing program at UNCW and Valerie’s former mentor, died the week before Bigger than Bravery was published. Gerard helped Valerie with Wrapped in Rainbows, and Fleming’s students helped bring her final book into the world.

“I feel like Val is still here,” Nsenga Burton said when we spoke last December. Burton, a professor of film and media at Emory University, said Valerie helped her to feel at home in Atlanta, introducing her to the stories of the Bankhead neighborhood, where Valerie grew up. They “ate their way through Georgia,” bonding over good food, like Serpas’ Cajun cuisine and Erika Council’s biscuits. But, more importantly, their friendship inspired Burton to work on projects that made her feel whole, like co-editing Black Women’s Mental Health: Balancing Strength and Vulnerability. In 2021, Valerie asked Burton to help launch HealthPlus, a digital monthly magazine of the Atlanta Voice focusing on health and wellness in the African American community. “Even though [Valerie] is physically not here, I’m like, she’s in the walls, she’s in this light right here. She’s still here. I can feel her every time I write something. … I think Val left everybody with projects.”

Kelundra Smith, an Atlanta-based arts and culture writer, took two journalism classes from Valerie as an undergraduate and laughed that her former professor “never stopped” giving her homework. Smith’s Bitter Southerner interview with Katori Hall was her last direct assignment from Valerie. Years earlier, Valerie was one of the first people Smith told about her idea to write a play inspired by Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun.” Valerie told her to go for it, and in 2020, Smith buckled down on her passion project. Last winter, True Colors Theatre hosted a developmental reading of Smith’s play, “Younger.” Ever the optimist, Valerie texted from her hospital bed that she would try to be there.

The first of the readings was scheduled for February 18; Valerie died on February 12.

Smith knows Valerie’s curiosity and encouragement compelled her to see her project through. In gratitude, Smith nurtures younger writers and turns to writers Burton, Bentley, Osayi Endolyn, Kamille Whittaker, and others for camaraderie and support. “By the time she passed, she had left me with so many journalism mentors and journalism godmothers, so to speak.”

• • •

Even while being treated for pancreatic cancer, Valerie continued to travel and draw people into her circle. “Throughout her illness, Valerie kept working,” Bentley explained, because “she made it her mission to tell the stories of Black women specifically, so she just kept doing that work for five years.”

Aunjanue Ellis wants to make one thing clear: She became friends with Valerie grudgingly. When Ellis, a Mississippi-based actress, activist, and writer, met Valerie in 2019, she had a feeling that Valerie was sick. “I knew if something happened to her, I would be very hurt about it and it would cause a little bit of a small apocalypse,” Ellis confessed. Despite the anticipatory grief, the women became dear friends. “There’s no halfway being friends with her, you know what I mean?” Ellis said. “Like Toni Morrison talks about, she became ‘a friend of my mind.’”

“I grieve her leaving, and sometimes it’s just so inconvenient for me,” Ellis said, laughing. Ellis is working on a screenplay about Mississippi freedom fighter Fannie Lou Hamer, and she wishes she could keep talking through the pitfalls and challenges with Valerie. “It’s like not being able to get her on the phone. … You know what I’m saying? It’s like this conversation that we didn’t finish.”

Anoa Monsho reached out to Valerie last winter after having been out of touch for a decade, but they never had that catch-up phone call. Monsho met Valerie at a Hannibal [Lokumbe] concert in the mid-’90s. Valerie invited Monsho to write for Health Quest, a Black health magazine she had founded. (Valerie was also the founding editor of EightRock, a Black arts and culture magazine.) Since her death, Monsho sometimes just sits there and says, “Now what, Val?”

Monsho reread Wrapped in Rainbows and noticed how “Valerie had a really clear idea of what death was then; which is just kind of the filmiest of veils. That is what she wrote in Bigger Than Bravery, and that when her dad passed, he became an influential ancestor, still looking out for her. I feel Valerie guiding me, and several other writers she influenced feel the same way.”

As the founder of the first nonfiction program to be housed in a journalism school, Valerie was adamant that her students must not “make shit up.” This did not stop her from observing and honoring the spirit world. In the season of grief after her father’s death in 2020, Valerie noticed an owl during a Sunday morning walk with a friend. On Instagram, she posted a photo along with symbolism surrounding owls, interpreting it as “assurance … that we are gonna be alright.”

Later that year, a hawk visited her front porch and Valerie acknowledged it as a special visitor, there to teach and guide.

Valerie was inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame last fall, and her brother Timothy accepted her award posthumously. He shared how his big sister got her start as a newswoman: running from house to house to announce his birth. As he was writing his speech, he wasn’t sure how or when to end it. He took a walk to think about it, and a hawk swooped down and perched on a stop sign. It was as though she was offering editorial advice just when her brother needed it.

Since her passing, many have repeated some variation of this refrain: “Valerie Boyd changed my life.” I interviewed over a dozen people for this story, and each one mentioned more writers, books, presses, editors, teachers, musicians, poets, filmmakers, chefs, visual artists, and playwrights that Valerie guided and still inspires through her web of positive influence. I want to hear and write every story, to name every name. The ones with the big awards, the ones just starting out, and the ones dusting themselves off and beginning again. We have not all met one another, but we are connected, through invisible threads, to a woman who called forth the best in us. Valerie’s world kept expanding and drawing people to become the people the world desperately needs, people who can tell the truth, shine, and, like Wilbur — a plain country pig washed clean in buttermilk — still be humble.

While Wilbur was winning the blue ribbon in the fair, Charlotte spent her final days creating her magnum opus, 514 eggs wrapped safe and dry in her silken sac. And then she died. Wilbur, with the help of the conniving rat, Templeton, brought Charlotte’s eggs back from the fairgrounds to the barn. The seasons changed, and Wilbur’s life was so much better because of Charlotte, but his heart ached that she was not there, with him, to share in his joyfully transformed life.

Wilbur often thought of Charlotte. A few strands of her old web still hung in the doorway. Every day Wilbur would stand and look at the torn, empty web, and a lump would come to his throat. No one had ever had such a friend — so affectionate, so loyal, and so skillful.

Watch a spider build her web. She leaps into the air, tethered by her invisible, unbreakable thread. She knows what she is doing. Valerie built a writers community with a few simple rules: Don’t be an asshole, and don’t make shit up. We — any and every person who was buoyed by her words and work — are her magnum opus.

We can’t call her anymore just to hear her voicemail’s closing sentence: “Have a peaceful and productive day.” Instead, we write, we reach out, and we weave webs of our own.