Diversity Affairs Feature

African American Women Writers

Many notable African American women have profoundly contributed to our country’s heritage. Here are just a few of the well-known women who have touched the hearts and souls of many through written words in novels, short stories, and song lyrics.

Zora Neal Hurston (1891-1960)

Zora Neal Hurston became the most successful and most significant black woman writer of the first half of the 20th century. She has influenced such writers as Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, Gayl Jones, Alice Walker, and Toni Cade Bambara and befriended such luminaries as poet Langston Hughes and popular singer/actress Ethel Waters. She published four novels, two books of folklore, an autobiography, many short stories, and several essays, articles and plays. Though she wrote many works of literature, the late 1930s and ‘40s marked the real zenith of her career. In 1942, her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road, resulted in her profile in Who’s Who in America, Current Biography, and Twentieth Century Authors.

She published Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), Tell My Horse (1938), her study of Caribbean Voodoo practices, and Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939).