Valerie Boyd, the author and editor who wrote “Gathering Blossoms Under Fire: The Journals of Alice Walker,” has died after a battle with cancer.

Walker won the Pulitzer Prize for her novel “The Color Purple” which became the 1985 movie of the same name.

Boyd was also the author of a well regarded biography of Zora Neale Hurston which was published in 2003, was a former arts editor at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and noted for her “painstaking and thorough” research.

Valerie Boyd was 58.