“No matter how far a person can go, the horizon is still way beyond you.”

125 years after her birth, Zora Neale Hurston ’28BC, ’34-’35GSAS remains one of the most renowned Harlem Renaissance authors. Known for her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), Hurston captured the dialects and stories of her native rural Florida. She was the first African-American student at Barnard before studying anthropology at Columbia in graduate school. The Zora Neale Hurston Professorship of English at Columbia honors her life and revolutionary writing. Learn more.

The Alumni Center’s eighth-floor conference room is named after Hurston.