Are You Ready to Write?
February is Black History Month. What better time to think about writing your story? In February we officially honor African American trailblazers. Prominent among those honored are writers. Writers like Frederick Douglass, born into slavery, a man who put language at his command. Douglass used words as an orator and a writer to change his personal history and in support of societal change for us all. We honor Zora Neale Hurston, best-known as the author of the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. But Hurston was also an anthropologist, whose groundbreaking field work in the American South, Haiti and the Caribbean shaped the
future of anthropology. We look at and interpret history, the past and the present in a much more complex and rich way, because of the contributions of Douglass and Hurston. To paraphrase lines from a poem by the Persian bard Rumi, they went in the direction where there was no direction, and there they found themselves and all of us at the end of their journey.