POUGHKEEPSIE, NY — Stage and screen actress Kim Brockington will star in Zora, a one-woman play about the life of the great Harlem Renaissance writer Zora Neale Hurston, on Saturday, March 1, at 7:00pm, in the Martel Theater of the Vogelstein Center for Drama and Film. This event is free and open to the public, but advance reservations with the Department of Drama box office are encouraged (845-437-5584, boxoffice@vassar.edu).

An American folklorist and ethnographer best known for her 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, Hurston is considered one of the preeminent writers of twentieth-century African-American literature, and her influence has extended to such authors as Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, Gayle Jones, Alice Walker, and Toni Cade Bambara. Following decades of relative obscurity, Hurston’s work began to gain wider interest after Ms. magazine published the Alice Walker essay “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston” in 1975. Earlier, the scholar Robert Hemenway wrote that Hurston “helped to remind the Renaissance – especially its more bourgeois members – of the richness in the racial heritage.”

Kim Brockington has recently performed Zora at the Library of Congress and The Kennedy Center, as well as for PBS and the American Place Theater. She has also guest starred on such television programs as The West Wing and Law and Order. Brockington is a graduate of The American Academy of Dramatic Arts, where she studied with Susan Batson and Lloyd Richards.

This staging of Zora is sponsored by the Department of English and the Africana Studies program, and supported by the Department of Drama.