Zora Neale Hurston was born in 1901 in Eatonville, Fla. She left home at the age of 17, finished high school in Baltimore, and went on to study at Howard University, Barnard College, and Columbia University before becoming one of the most prolific writers in the Harlem Renaissance. Her works included novels, essays, plays, and studies in folklore and anthropology. Her most productive years were the 1930s and early 1940s. It was during those years that she wrote her autobiography Dust Tracks on a Road, worked with the Federal Writers Project in Florida, received a Guggenheim fellowship, and wrote four novels. She is most remembered for her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, published in 1937. In 2018, her previously unpublished work, Barracoon: The Story of the Last Black Cargo, was published. She died penniless and in obscurity in 1960 and was buried in an unmarked grave. In 1973, her grave was rediscovered and marked and her novels and autobiography have since been reprinted.
Jerry Pinkney was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on December 22, 1939. He began drawing as a four-year-old child, studied commercial art at the Dobbins Vocational School, and received a full scholarship to the Philadelphia Museum College of Art. After graduating, Pinkney worked in design and illustrations, helped found Kaleidoscope Studios, and later opened the Jerry Pinkney Studio. His is a children's book illustrator and has created the art for over one hundred titles including Julius Lester's John Henry, Sam and the Tigers, and The Old African, plus adaptations of Hans Christian Andersen's The Little Match Girl and The Nightingale. He has won numerous awards including six Caldecott Honor Medals, five Coretta Scott King Awards, four Coretta Scott King Honor Awards, four New York Times Best Illustrated Book awards, and the Hamilton King Award. He also received the Virginia Hamilton Literary award from Kent State University in 2000, the University of Southern Mississippi Medallion in 2004, the Original Art's Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society of Illustrators in 2006, Laura Ingalls Wilder Award in 2016, and the Coretta Scott King -Virginia Hamilton Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2016. In addition to holding numerous one-man retrospectives and exhibiting his work in more than one hundred international group shows, Pinkney's art resides in the permanent collections of the Library of Congress, the New York Public Library, the Delaware Art Museum, and the Brandywine River Art Museum. He has taught art at the Pratt Institute, the University of Delaware, and the University of Buffalo.
