American writer and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960) underwent various metamorphoses during the course of her life, Cornell professor Carole Boyce Davies said at a Feb. 10 event in Robert Purcell Community Center that celebrated Hurston's life.

"Along the way she saw and did beautiful things. The early Zora and the adult Zora invented and reinvented herself along the way," said Davies, professor of Africana studies and of English, after the documentary "Zora Neale Hurston: Jump at the Sun" was shown.

"Like her character Janie in 'Their Eyes Were Watching God,' 'She pulled in her horizon like a great fish-net. Pulled it from around the waist of the world and draped it over her shoulder. So much of life in its meshes! She called in her soul to come and see,'" Davies said, citing Hurston's best-known work.

Kenneth McClane, professor of English, said that Hurston "was a formidable figure who exemplified what it meant to be an extraordinarily intelligent individual with her very own convictions."

The 2008 film documents Hurston's childhood in an all-black town in Florida, her journey to Howard University where she first began to write, and then to Harlem, where many of the nation's most celebrated African-American artists resided. Hurston became a leading figure in the Harlem Renaissance cultural movement of the 1920s and 1930s.

"This film evidences what it means to be truly liberated -- to have and honor your own enthusiasms and your own sensibilities -- to love your people, as you see them, and through your own eyes," McClane said. "Whatever else one says about Zora Neale Hurston, she called her own shots; she was, as the film shows, 'always Queen Zora.'"

Filmmaker Kristy Andersen, who also spoke at the event, explored Hurston's life by interviewing several prominent African-American scholars and by tracing her travels in the Deep South, researching how African-Americans lived and recording details of their lives.

The event, part of the Black History Month celebration on campus, was sponsored by Black Students United, Campus Life, the Africana Studies and Research Center, Southside Community Center of Ithaca and the Village at Ithaca.

Farhan Nuruzzaman '12 is a writer intern for the Cornell Chronicle.