Melba Joyce Boyd is author of Wrestling with the Muse: Dudley Randall and the Broadside Press and Discarded Legacy: Politics and Poetics in the Life of Frances E. W. Harper, 1825-1911 (Wayne State University Press, 1994), co-editor of Abandon Automobile: Detroit City Poetry 2001 (Wayne State University Press, 2001), and author of seven books of poetry, including Death Dance of a Butterfly. She is a distinguished university professor and chair of the Department of Africana Studies at Wayne State University and adjunct professor at the Center for Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.