Blanche McCrary Boyd

Blanche McCrary Boyd (born August 31, 1945) is an American author. She worked as the Roman and Tatiana Weller Professor of English and Writer-in-Residence at Connecticut College for 40 years until her retirement in 2022.

Early life and education Blanche McCrary Boyd was born in Charleston, South Carolina, to Charles Fant McCrary and Mildred McDaniel. She says that growing up in South Carolina was the source of her "redneck roots."

Career Boyd wrote her first novel in hopes of combatting her lesbianism, in a sense, or at least to make something sad out of it. Nerves was published in 1973. Its publication did not cure her internalized homophobia, she realized, so she soon left her husband.

Terminal Velocity, the follow-up to The Revolution of Little Girls, was published in 1997, and it was called “A rollicking, kaleidoscopic trip through the drug-tinged lesbian-feminist counter-culture of the 1970s”.

Boyd won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1993–1994, a National Endowment for the Arts Fiction Fellowship in 1988, a Creative Writing Fellowship from the South Carolina Arts Commission in 1982–1983 and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Creative Writing from Stanford University in 1967–1968. She was also won the Lambda Literary Award that same year. She was nominated for the Lambda Award for Lesbian Fiction again in 1997.

In 2018, she published the third installment in the Revolution of Little Girls trilogy, Tomb of the Unknown Racist. In 2019 she was named as a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for this novel.

Boyd worked as the Roman and Tatiana Weller Professor of English and Writer-in-Residence at Connecticut College up until her retirement in 2022. During her time at Connecticut College she educated other female authors such as Ann Napolitano, Sloane Crosley, Jessica Soffer, and Hannah Tinti.

Personal life After leaving her husband, Boyd moved to Vermont to protest the Vietnam War and live on a commune. She continued drinking and doing drugs, until eventually she got arrested. She left Vermont a year and a half later, and then moved to New York.

After her stint as a rock and roll critic, Boyd moved back to South Carolina, where she continued to struggle with drug and alcohol addition until 1980, when she says she had a moment of clarity when she watched her friend shoot herself. and now have twins.