Zora Neale Hurston was born in 1901 in Eatonville, Fla. She left home at the age of 17, finished high school in Baltimore, and went on to study at Howard University, Barnard College, and Columbia University before becoming one of the most prolific writers in the Harlem Renaissance. Her works included novels, essays, plays, and studies in folklore and anthropology. Her most productive years were the 1930s and early 1940s. It was during those years that she wrote her autobiography Dust Tracks on a Road, worked with the Federal Writers Project in Florida, received a Guggenheim fellowship, and wrote four novels. She is most remembered for her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, published in… 1937. She died penniless and in obscurity in 1960 and was buried in an unmarked grave. In 1973, her grave was rediscovered and marked and her novels and autobiography have since been reprinted.
An award-winning artist internationally renowned for her painted story quilts, Faith Ringgold is also the author of thirteen children's picture books, including the 1992 Caldecott Honor Award-winning Tar Beach . Her artwork is in the permanent collections of many museums, including the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Museum of Modern Art. She also has had exhibitions in major museums in the United States, Europe, South America, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. She lives in Englewood, New Jersey, with her husband.
Joyce Carol Thomas is an internationally renowned author who received the National Book Award for her first novel, Marked By Fire , and a Coretta Scott King Honor for The Blacker the Berry and for her first picture book, Brown Honey in Broomwheat Tea . Her picture book I Have Heard of a Land received a Coretta Scott King Honor and an IRA/CBC Teachers' Choice Award and was an ALA Notable Book. Her other titles include The Gospel Cinderella , Crowning Glory , Gingerbread Days , and A Gathering of Flowers . Ms. Thomas lives in Berkeley, California.