The 2026 edition of the Department’s Zora Neale Hurston Lecture featured acclaimed author Jamaica Kincaid in discussion with Edwidge Danticat, the Wun Tsun Tam Mellon Professor of the Humanities in the Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Columbia University.
Kincaid was named earlier this year as the department’s 2026 Artist-in-Residence. The globally acclaimed author of numerous widely taught and translated novels and essays— including “Annie John,” “Lucy,” “A Small Place,” “The Autobiography of My Mother,” and “See Now Then” — the Antiguan-American novelist’s profound intellectual and cultural influence extends far beyond literature, into art, cultural studies, and political thought. She is a professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University.
Kincaid’s discussion with Danticat was held March 6 at the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. The event was organized by the Department and the Institute for Research in African American Studies. Co-sponsors included Africana Studies Barnard College; the Institute for the Study of Sexuality Gender; the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race; the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society; and Columbia University School of the Arts.
Danticat’s most recent essay collection, “We're Alone,” published in 2025, joins her previous acclaimed works: including “Create Dangerously;” “Breath, Eyes, Memory,” an Oprah Book Club selection; “Krik? Krak,” a National Book Award finalist; “Claire of the Sea Light;” “Brother, I'm Dying,” a National Book Critics Circle Award winner and National Book Award finalist; as well as seven books for children and young adults; and a travel narrative, “After the Dance.”
The annual lecture honors the intellectual fierceness and talents of the singular anthropologist, novelist, and essayist Sister Zora — therefore also honoring our long Black intellectual tradition and its connection to Columbia, and Harlem.
A complex figure, Hurston began her career as a Columbia University doctoral student in anthropology at Columbia University. Her inimitable ‘spyglass’ and sensibilities have forever shifted the literary and anthropological landscapes: demonstrated by her novels “Jonah’s Gourd Vine” and “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” for example; ethnographic and folkloric works, “Mules and Men,” and “Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica;” her extraordinary autoethnographic work, “Dust Tracks on a Road;” short story collections, including “Spunk;” plays, and essays, like “Pet Negro System.”
