Devon Boan

Biography

Devon Boan is an author, cultural critic, and playwright who grew up in the foothills of North Carolina, working in furniture factories, movie theaters, and the city recreation center. He studied philosophy at Lenoir Rhyne College and explored a career in parish ministry before discovering he had a talent for telling stories and an interest in mining their insights. Seizing the day, he earned an M.A. in creative writing at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte and a Ph.D. in African American literature at the University of South Carolina.

His book The Black "I": Author and Audience in African American Literature posits a new approach to interpreting 20th century African American literature and has been called “an original and theoretically sophisticated analysis” and “an important contribution to our understanding of ethnicity and modern American culture.” His play “Darkroom” was the opening-night finalist at FutureFest, a new play festival in Dayton, Ohio, and the keynote presentation at the Midlands Tech Multicultural Symposium in Columbia, South Carolina, and his play "No Man Knoweth His Sepulcher" was named Best Play in Gardner-Webb University’s New Play Competition. He has published stories, poems, essays, and articles in more than a dozen journals, anthologies, and newspapers. His latest project is a novel, The Fabulist d’Artagnan in Harlem.

Devon has taught literature, cultural and artistic criticism, creative writing, and sociology at three universities in North and South Carolina and, for the past twenty-four years, at Belmont. He lives outside Nashville, Tennessee, with his wife Kay, an educational administrator.