Dr. Melba Joyce Boyd Poetry Reading
Fri, November 14, 2025 7:00 PM at East Lansing Public Library, 950 Abbot Rd., East Lansing, MI
Please join us as we welcome Michigan Poet Laureate Melba Joyce Boyd to mid-Michigan! Dr. Boyd's reading at the East Lansing Public Library serves as a keynote address to the Lansing Poetry Club's Poets' Roundtable Conference, being held the following day at the Library of Michigan in Lansing, where she will offer a workshop.
A reception and book signing will follow the reading.
The reading is free and open to the public. The event will be live-streamed on the East Lansing Public Library's Facebook page.
A Native Detroiter, Melba Joyce Boyd is the third Poet Laureate of the State of Michigan and a Kresge Eminent Artist (2023). Dr. Boyd is a Distinguished Professor Emerita in the Department of African American Studies at Wayne State University, where she also served as the Department Chair for 16 years. She was elected to the Academy of Scholars in 2021. In 2024, Western Michigan University, honored her with the Distinguished Alumni Award (B.A. 1971 and M.A. in 1972). She earned a Doctor of Arts in English at the University of Michigan (1979) and has served as an Adjunct Professor in Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan—Ann Arbor since 1994. Boyd also held professorial positions at the University of Iowa (1982-88) and Ohio State University (1988-89).
An award-winning author of nine books of poetry, three documentary films, two biographies, editor of two poetry anthologies, and over 100 published essays (1972-2024), Boyd was the assistant editor to Dudley Randall at Broadside Press (1972-76), a contributing editor to The Black Scholar (1980-2004), and she is currently the editor of the African American Life Series at Wayne State University Press. She is the author of Wrestling with the Muse: Dudley Randall and the Broadside Press (Columbia University Press, 2004)
She was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Bremen in Germany (1983-4), a guest professor at the Fudan University in Shanghai, China (2009), and she has given lectures and poetry readings throughout the United States, Europe and China. Her poetry, essays and scholarship about African American literature and film have likewise appeared in anthologies, academic journals, cultural periodicals and newspapers locally and globally. Her poetry has been anthologized and translated into German, Italian and French, but possibly her most significant singular work is her poem, “This Museum Was Once a Dream,” engraved in bronze and displayed on the dedication wall of the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History in Detroit. Lines from her poetry appear in the sculpture, “Transcending: Michigan’s Tribute to Labor,” in Hart Plaza in Downtown Detroit, and her poem, “Maple Red” appears adjacent to the painting by Ed Clark in the Detroit Institute of Arts.
Her poetry collection, Death Dance of a Butterfly, received the 2013 Library of Michigan Notable Book Award for Poetry. Her first book of poetry, Cat Eyes and Dead Wood (1978) received a publication award from the National Endowment of the Arts. In 2010, Roses and Revolutions: The Selected Writings of Dudley Randall received the Independent Publishers Award, the Library of Michigan Notable Book Award for Poetry, and it was a finalist for the NAACP Image Award for Poetry and the ForeWord Award for Poetry. Wrestling with the Muse: Dudley Randall and the Broadside Press received the 2004 Honor for Nonfiction from The Black Caucus of the American Library Association. She received the Sojourner Truth Award for Community Service from the Council of Negro Women, Detroit Chapter of the ASALH Community Service Award, and the Spirit of Detroit Award on Martin Luther King Day in 2023.
Politics and Poetics: The Legacy of Frances E. W. Harper, an updated and expanded edition of Discarded Legacy by Wayne State University Press, is forthcoming in 2026.
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