“Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose.” - Zora Neale Hurston

On an unbearably hot day in August 1973, Alice Walker, future Pulitzer Prize winner for Fiction, stood in a snake infested field and called out the name of the spirit she sought - ZORA! Walker took a step forward and sunk into a rectangular patch of ground. She had found the unmarked grave of Zora Neale Hurston - “‘A GENIUS OF THE SOUTH’ NOVELIST, FOLKLORIST, ANTHROPOLOGIST” read the epitaph on the gravestone Walker made soon after.

Due to Walker’s pilgrimage the once celebrated star of the Harlem Renaissance, Zora Neale Hurston, and her out of print books were raised from obscurity. Hurston’s novel “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” has now become one of the most assigned books in U.S. literature classes. In 2018 Hurston’s very first book, “Barracoon: The Story of the Last Black Cargo,” based on her 1927 interviews with Oluale Kossola, one of the last survivors of the U.S. Atlantic slave trade, was published - at last.

View the complete Affirm Black Women portrait series here