Sneak Peek: Valerie Boyd Podcast

Valerie Boyd: I feel in many ways that my opportunity to do this book came about because of my long time interest in Hurston. I first read Their Eyes Were Watching God when I was a first-year college student, and I was blown away by the book-- just amazed that somebody could have written a book in the 1930s that still spoke to me so resonantly across the decades. I was touched by the character of Janie Crawford, but I was also very much interested in Zora Neale Hurston. I was interested in the woman behind the book, and as an aspiring writer, I really felt that I had found my literary grandmother of sorts. And so, my connection to Hurston began then. I read everything I could find by her and everything I could find about her including Robert Hemenway's 1977 biography of her, which was the only full-scale biography before Wrapped in Rainbows. And then in 1994, I heard Hemenway give a talk at the Zora Neale Hurston Festival in Eatonville in which he critiqued his own book and pointed out things that he felt he had missed because he was a man writing about a woman-- because he was a White American writing about an African-American. And he said, "It's time for a new biography to be written, and it needs to be written by a Black woman." And it was at that moment that I felt this sort of inner calling to tell her story-- to write her biography.