Dr. Devon Boan
Devon Boan is Director of the Honors Program at Belmont. He has degrees in American Literature, Religion and Culture, and Philosophy. He has been an editor, a prizewinning playwright, a sportswriter, a columnist, and, after brief careers in the ministry and with a research firm, has taught sociology, literature, creative writing, and interdisciplinary studies at three different universities. He joined the faculty at Belmont in 1996.
His interests and expertise lie in 20th Century American culture, especially African-American culture. Having come of age himself in the 1960s, his interest in American culture is far from just academic.
Dr. Boan's passion for African-American literature and culture has been obvious in both his career and his writing. A staged reading of his play Darkroom, the story of a black man struggling with his success in life while passing as a white man, was the featured work in the 1995 Multicultural Symposium at Midlands Tech in Columbia, South Carolina. He spent two years in the 1980s working in an interracial church in Louisville, Kentucky, and later worked as a consultant with religious leaders in St. Petersburg, Florida, and Charlotte, North Carolina, in efforts to expand their ministries to minority communities.
He is currently at work on a novel, Winter Rain, about an aging black Harvard historian and civil rights worker, originally from Mississippi, stunned by his childhood best friend's mysterious dying utterance into seeking answers about the friend's life, and his own past, in 1967 Detroit.
Dr. Boan is a native of North Carolina and has lived in Fort Worth, Louisville, Cincinnati, Atlanta, Columbia (SC), and Nashville.
