“Negro reality is a hundred times more imaginative and entertaining than anything that has ever been hatched up over a typewriter,” wrote Zora Neale Hurston. What Hurston sought in novels such as Their Eyes Were Watching God and also her non-fiction—on display in You Don’t Know Us Negroes and Other Essays—was “a revelation of the richness and complexity of Black Life,” writes Henry Louis Gates, Jr., in his introduction to the collection.

Join Daphne A. Brooks, author of Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound, for a discussion of You Don’t Know Us Negroes and Other Essays—a quintessential gathering of provocative essays spanning more than three decades, from the Harlem Renaissance to the Civil Rights Movement.

“I’m drawn to Zora Neale Hurston’s essays because of the ways that they showcase her genius as a cultural critic and a theorist of Black life,” writes Brooks. “Hurston’s essays are also works of art—formalistically surprising and inventive, drenched in rich and unmistakable character, and often poignantly candid as well.”

Students are encouraged to read the featured text in advance of the session.

A Q&A will follow the presentation, and a recording will be made available for those who cannot attend live.

The event will take place via Zoom with automatic closed captioning. To request any other accessibility features, please email support@authorsguild.org and we will make every effort to accommodate.

Presenter

Daphne A. Brooks is William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of African American Studies, American Studies, Women’s Gender & Sexuality Studies and Music at Yale University. She is the author of three books: Jeff Buckley’s Grace (2005); Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850-1910 (2006); and Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound (2021). She is currently working on a book entitled Rhapsody & Ruin: Porgy and Bess & the Story of America.

Presented by the Authors Guild Foundation, this new online literary seminar is inspired by Rachel Cohen’s A Chance Meeting, a dazzling group biography that offers a striking vision of the making and remaking of the American mind and imagination from the Civil War to the Vietnam War.

Following the book’s spirit and shape, the monthly sessions feature talks on beloved and thought-provoking classics of American literature by contemporary writers with a personal connection to the works they are discussing. Cohen herself will lead two talks and circulate an e-newsletter to students in the weeks between sessions.

View all Chance Meetings events here.