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            As part of the “Soul of a People: Writing America’s Story” project at Shawnee State University, Dr. Barbara Kunkle, professor of English and American Culture, will present a public lecture on a noted writer and folklorist who worked on the Federal Writer’s Project, Zora Neal Hurston, an African-American writer.
            The program will be presented at 7 p.m. on Thursday, Sept. 24 at the Flohr Lecture Hall in SSU’s Clark Memorial Library. The program is free and open to the public.
            Hurston, author of “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” among others, worked on the project for more than a year. She contributed to the WPA Guide to Florida and recorded songs and stories along Florida’s Gulf Coast. She was a leading figure of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 30s.
            Hurston grew up in Eatonville, Fla., the first incorporated all-black township in America and this was the setting for her book “Their Eyes Were Watching God.” The story unfolds with the women of Eatonville gossiping about Janie Crawford, the book’s heroine.
            Although Hurston wrote several books and participated in valuable community projects for the WPA, she died in poverty and was buried in an unmarked grave in 1960. In 1975, another black woman writer, Alice Walker, published an article in Ms. Magazine about Hurston and launched a Hurston revival. Today, she has reached a status as a great American writer and her books are read now more than they were in her lifetime.
            Kunkle’s lecture is part of a series of public programs being produced with the financial support of a “Soul of a People” grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Library Association. Connie Stoner, director of Clark Memorial Library, is directing the grant and Dr. Andrew Feight is the lead scholar for the program. SSU’s library was one of only 30 libraries across the country to receive the grant.