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OBEMA Volume 2 Melba Joyce Boyd "Song for Maya" Biography: Melba Joyce Boyd was born in 1950 in Detroit. She is a poet and biographer and studied film and literature at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. Boyd held many teaching positions at universities in Michigan, Bremen and Iowa, and is a Fulbright Scholar and a contributing editor to The Black Scholar. Currently she is an associate professor and chairs the Africana Studies at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. She also is an adjunct associate professor at the Center for Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, where she received her Doctor of Arts in English in 1979. Her first book, Cat Eyes and Dead Wood, was published by Fallen Angel Press in 1978. Boyd also wrote and produced the documentary film The Black Unicorn: Dudley Randall and the Broadside Press on the life and work of Dudley Randall, an American poet who established the Broadside Press in 1965 and to whom she was an assistant editor between 1972 and 1977. Randall, as publisher and editor, broadened the American literary canon and his poetry won him several awards. The Black Unicorn was funded by numerous institutions. Melba Joyce Boyd published five books of poetry, including Letters to Che, The Inventory of Black Roses, and Thirteen Frozen Flamingoes. Boyd also writes biographies. Her essays and poetry have appeared in many books and periodicals in the U.S. and in Germany. Excerpt from "TUKASEEGEE" (in: Song for Maya) Hostility breeds disruption that imbalances the planet, splits sunrays warping time, slanting the axis, reflecting irregular angles into the face of God. Soon, more and more layers of the sky will fall down. and the rivers will turn around. more Indians will transcend the Fifth Dimension to insulate the universe from the clash of hemispheres.   Feindseligkeit zeugt zerrissenheit, die den planeten ins ungleichgewicht bringt, spaltet sonnenstrahlen, krümmt die zeit, neigt die achse, reflektiert unregelmäßige winkel ins Gesicht Gottes. Schon bald werden mehr und mehr schichten des himmels herabfallen. und die flüsse werden umkehren. mehr indianer werden die Fünfte Dimension überschreiten, um das universum vom zusammenstoß der hemisphären abzuschirmen. Internet: http://www.owwa.org/html/speaker2.html http://www.igc.org/solidarity/jazz66.txt