Blanche McCrary Boyd

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Blanche McCrary Boyd (born 1945) is an American author whose novels are known for their eccentric characters. Her most recent novel is Terminal Velocity, written in 1997. She is currently the Roman and Tatiana Weller Professor of English and Writer-in-Residence at Connecticut College.

A native of South Carolina, the source of her "redneck" roots, Boyd has taught at Connecticut College since 1982. She is a member of P.E.N., the Authors Guild, the Writers Guild of America and of Phi Beta Kappa. She has written four novels: Nerves, Mourning the Death of Magic, The Revolution of Little Girls and Terminal Velocity, as well as a collection of essays titled The Redneck Way of Knowledge. She also has a large body of published articles, short fiction and screenplays to her credit. Among her more recently published articles are essays on Susan Smith in The Village Voice (July, 1995) and the Oxford-American (May, 1996), and two essays in Ms. magazine (September/October, 1995 and August/September, 2000). The latest article, Ms.'s cover story, examined some of the reasons why feminists and the general public have conflicted feelings about Hillary Clinton’s run for the New York Senate.

Among the awards Boyd has won are 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 nominated for the Southern Book Award in 1991 and for the Lambda Award for Lesbian Fiction in 1997. Earlier in 1991, she won the Lambda Award for Lesbian Fiction.