UDM’s New Black Box Theatre Hosts Its First Poetry Reading with Michigan Poet Laureate Dr. Melba Joyce Boyd

On Saturday, September 27th, the University of Detroit Mercy’s newly opened Black Box Theatre hosted its first poetry reading with Dr. Melba Joyce Boyd.

A writer and academic, Dr. Boyd is Michigan’s third poet laureate and currently holds the position of Distinguished Professor of African American Studies at Wayne State University. She has authored a total of thirteen books in her career, and continues to be a strong voice in African American literature.

Before Dr. Boyd’s introduction, student writers Asha George and Allena Williams read original works that demonstrated the talent and skill of UDM’s rising poets.

To ease into her portion of the evening, Dr. Boyd spoke of two of the inspirations for many of her poems. The first was Dudley Randall, an African American writer who founded the Broadside Press publishing company where Dr. Boyd formerly worked as an assistant editor. The second was Frances. E.W. Harper, a poet and activist who advocated for women’s rights and the abolition of slavery. She was one of the first African American women to publish a novel. With these two powerful figures to guide her motivation, Dr. Boyd’s own poems reflect the same preservation of African American experiences and culture.

The first of Dr. Boyd’s original works read that evening was “The Return of Violet Starfish,” which is a tribute to her younger cousin who passed of breast cancer. Full of fragmented but detailed imagery and intentional cadence, Dr. Boyd’s poem masterfully pieces together a story of grief, faith, and overcoming loss in only a few short stanzas.

Dr. Boyd’s writing has a musical tone that entrances readers and listeners, and her poetry can be described as the coupling of art and history, where one becomes inseparable from the other. The rhythmic quality of Dr. Boyd’s poems are a result of her time as a jazz musician. Even now, several of her works are meant to be read with accompanying music. Although there was no singing in the Black Box Theatre for her poem “Rock Steady for Aretha Franklin,” Dr. Boyd’s natural lyricism and musical intuition provided the perfect spoken melody.

In this ode, she writes, “Her rhythm and blues are liberation anthems, bridges over troubled waters,” and, “Born in Memphis, raised up in Detroit City, reaching Spanish Harlem, with spiritual reverberation scaling on nation’s blues.”

As an African American writer, Dr. Boyd feels that preserving Black history is of the utmost importance at a time where, she says, “culture and representation are under attack.” In her Q&A session, she stressed that young aspiring writers and poets have a duty to build a sense of community that can’t be easily broken.

Just as her poems center around history, culture, and faith, Dr. Melba Joyce Boyd remains a steadfast advocate for the continuity of literature that inspires remembering the past to create a stronger future. In the final moments of the evening, she left us with this thought: poetry is more than reflection. It’s an act of resistance, and it’s the courage to be “bodacious”—bold and outrageous—in the face of adversity.

This event served as a proud acknowledgement that the university’s new Black Box Theatre is a vibrant space for many future shows of creativity and cultural exchange in Detroit.