New Issues of TFH: Journal of History and Folklore Available Now

Recognizing Black History Month and folklore’s place within it, Kathy King’s essay “’He is the Story that All Weak People Create to Compensate for their Weakness’: African American Women Writing Folklore in the Federal Writers’ Project” explores the work of Margaret Walker, Dorothy West, and Zora Neale Hurston.

African American writers belonged to the group hit hardest by the economic collapse. Among them were three women writers: Margaret Walker, Dorothy West, and Zora Neale Hurston. These women conducted interviews, collected folklore, wrote and edited manuscripts, and used both their time in and material from the FWP for their own fiction. In this way, narratives of Black female subjectivity made it into literature and history, with women writing Black female voices and heroines into the historical narrative of the United States by revising, transforming, and subverting traditional codes and genres. 

Kathi King is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Freiburg. Her dissertation is on African American Women Writers for the WPA.