New Fiction Showcases Zora Neale Hurston as a Young Detective

Zora Neale Hurston, the Columbia University scholar and iconic writer of the Harlem Renaissance, is being reintroduced to the younger generation of Americans in a new novel, Zora and Me. In the book, Hurston is a fourth-grade student in Eatonville, Florida, the all-black town in which the real Zora Neale Hurston was raised. In the novel, Zora and her friends set out to solve a mystery surrounding the discovery of a headless body near the town’s railroad tracks.

Zora and Me is the first book not written by Hurston that has the endorsement of the Zora Neale Hurston Trust, which oversees the rights to the publication of the author’s works. The novel is authored by Tanya Simon, a literary agent, and Victoria Bond, a lecturer in composition and classics at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City.

Copyright © 2010. The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education. All rights reserved.