Childhood stories from ‘Queen of the Harlem Renaissance’ depicted in new book

LAWRENCE — Stories from the childhood of the “Queen of the Harlem Renaissance” provide the incentive for a new book aimed at younger readers.

“This story is about not taking the safe path. It’s about following your heart,” said author Giselle Anatol, professor of English at the University of Kansas.

Her picture book titled “Small-Girl Zora and the Shower of Stories: A Tall Tale Based on the Life and Work of Zora Neale Hurston” offers a joyful tribute to this icon of American literature. Filled with references to Hurston’s classic characters and details from her own life (1891-1960), the story finds young Zora spinning outlandish tales, convinced they are “gonna change the world.” 

It is published by Viking Books for Young Readers.

This is the second book in which Anatol has adopted a “small-girl” approach, following her 2023 effort, “Small-Girl Toni and the Quest for Gold,” about author Toni Morrison. Both are illustrated by Raissa Figueroa, who Anatol praises for her “richness of color and the way she captures light and shadow.”

“I went to a public high school in New Jersey, and we did not read any texts written by women or people of color as part of the formal curriculum. When I got to college and realized there were Caribbean literature classes and whole classes on African American women writers and Native poetry and such, I was shocked. I didn’t know these things existed. Reading Hurston’s 1937 novel, ‘Their Eyes Were Watching God,’ was really mind-blowing for me in so many ways,” Anatol said.

Although Morrison’s work continues to resonate with modern audiences, Hurston’s has been less pervasive. Anatol chose Hurston as her latest subject in hope of bringing the author to a new generation of readers.

“If you poll undergraduate English majors now, in 2026, and ask them, ‘What text have you read more often than any other in your lit classes?,’ it might be a book like Morrison’s ‘Beloved.’ But when I was at Yale in the late ’80s, early ’90s, I read ‘Their Eyes Were Watching God’ in a Southern literature class, a Harlem Renaissance class, an African American literature class and a 19th century literature class,” she said. 

Anatol considers Hurston’s style in that novel to be fundamentally “unconventional.” She hopes “Small-Girl Zora” echoes “the feeling of African American folk life” and “stories people tell on their front porch” that characterize Hurston’s approach. 

She said she’s also influenced by the 1980 work “Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography.” That work was written by the late Robert Hemenway, who was KU’s chancellor between 1995 and 2009.

“That biography brought Hurston out of literary obscurity,” Anatol said.

While researching the author’s life, she ran across several little-known details that informed her perception.

“I had heard Hurston always lied about her age,” she said. “It turns out that while in her 20s, because she hadn’t finished high school, she lied about her age to be able to get into a public school to finish her high school degree. It’s interesting to know that’s what she valued and wanted to make her life better: an education.” 

The professor has plans for a future “small-girl” book. Only next time it might be a “small-boy” story based on Saint Lucian poet and playwright Derek Walcott.

“What unites Zora and Toni and Derek — and a lot of other Caribbean writers and artists throughout the African diaspora — is they are invested in embedding folk stories or sayings in their work. It helps ensure that the voices of those who might not be able to go to college or who might not even be literate are still recognized and presented as saying important things. That theme circles through a lot of the work I do,” she said. 

A KU faculty member since 1998, Anatol researches Caribbean and African American literature and children’s and young adult literature. She is also the director of KU’s Hall Center for the Humanities, which has a mission to “support research in the humanities, to create knowledge and to share that knowledge with diverse communities.”

Anatol said she believed a story can change the world.

“When I first read stories by Toni Morrison and Zora Neale Hurston, they changed my world. They broke it open and exposed me to ways of life, practices and histories that I didn’t know existed,” she said. “It made the world a bigger, richer, more exciting place, and made me desire to go out into it to learn more.”