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Novel picked for Big Read
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Published: June 24, 2009
Updated: 06/24/2009 12:20 am
A 1937 novel set in Florida has been picked for this year's community reading project this fall, the Forsyth County Public Library announced yesterday.
The library will join 269 other libraries across the country in participating in the Big Read, a project sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts and designed to revitalize reading in American culture.
In Winston-Salem, people will be cracking open Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston. The novel, set in central and southern Florida, tells the story of a teen-age black girl who grows into a woman and takes charge of her destiny, said Don Dwiggins, speaking for the library.
The library, in partnership with the Z. Smith Reynolds Library at Wake Forest University, was awarded a $10,000 grant from the NEA for the reading project.
Forsyth County's Big Read kicks off Sept. 12 as part of the Bookmarks Festival of Books in downtown Winston-Salem.
The NEA grant is allowing the library to bring in several prestigious Hurston scholars to Winston-Salem, said Elizabeth Skinner, who chairs the project in Forsyth.
One scholar, Robert Hemenway, will serve as the honorary chair of the Big Read and will speak at Diggs Gallery on Oct. 1 Hemenway is the author of Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography.
"Hurston was a person who was enormously talented," said Hemenway, who steps down June 30 as chancellor of the University of Kansas in Lawrence, Kan. "She came along at a time when as an African-American writer she was sort of a captive of the time. She was very conscious of her Southern roots and in particular the life that African-Americans in the South lived. She once said that she had the map of Florida on her tongue, and was very proud of the cultural life that black people had in the South."
Hemenway said Hurston was a folklorist as well as a novelist. Her inspiration came from small towns in the South "where black people expressed themselves in interesting and unique ways."
Hurston traveled through North Carolina and taught at N.C. Central University in Durham, Hemenway said.
"People will just find it a wonderful experience," he said of the book. "It is a very inspiring book, a love story."
Hemenway said he will probably focus on Hurston's biography in his talk.
"She lived a fascinating life," he said. "She spent time in the backwoods and in turpentine camps. She once said that folklore is what black folks had before they knew there was a such thing as art."
Skinner said that Big Read activities would culminate Oct. 24-25 with a one-woman show, "Zora," presented by the N.C. Black Repertory Company.
■ Wesley Young can be reached at 727-7369 or at wyoung@wsjournal.com.
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