Client Success Stories: How Ann Perry Wallace Wrote her Zora Neale Hurston Solo Show

"Ann Perry Wallace’s one-woman performance honoring the incomparable Zora Neale Hurston was nothing short of transcendent. I had the pleasure of witnessing an excerpt at the Zora Neale Hurston Summit hosted at Barnard College, and let me say this with my full chest—I was on my feet applauding before the lights had fully dimmed. It was that good.

Wallace doesn’t just portray Zora; she becomes her. But more than that, she conjures a world. In a seamless, soulful, and often hilarious weaving of Zora’s voice with the voices of family, friends, and the community that shaped her, Wallace builds a layered, living tapestry that feels like stepping into Zora’s front porch, her juke joints, her classrooms, and her fieldwork journeys. She is as deft with Hurston’s wit as she is with her philosophical weight. One moment I was laughing out loud—because let’s be real, Zora was funny—and the next, I was pulled into a well of reflection on memory, voice, and the cost of being a Black woman ahead of your time.

As a scholar of Hurston’s work and someone who carries her spirit in the marrow of my own writing and teaching, I was struck by Wallace’s extraordinary ability to breathe life into not only Zora’s words but also her interiority. We so often cite Zora’s brilliance in literature, anthropology, and folklore, but this performance reminded me that Zora was also a whole person—a lover of laughter, a fighter, a dreamer, a woman who insisted on being herself at all costs. Wallace gave us that Zora. Whole and holy. Complicated and free.
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What made this performance especially powerful was Wallace’s command of rhythm and pacing—she moved in and out of character with the fluidity of memory itself. Nothing felt forced. Nothing was caricatured. Each voice, each gesture, each silence carried weight. It was performance as praise song, as invocation, as living archive. It was also a necessary correction: too often, Zora is flattened into an icon or misread entirely. Wallace’s embodiment reminded us that Zora Neale Hurston was not just a “genius of the South,” but a radically human being who dared to see Black life—rural, Southern, womanist, spiritual—as worthy of celebration and study.

This performance left me full. It left me grateful. It left me seen.

Ann Perry Wallace has created something rare: a work that speaks across time, across generations, across disciplines. It is a gift to scholars, to students, to lovers of Black literature and performance—and most of all, to Zora.

Thank you, Ms. Wallace, for giving us back our Zora."

--Aiesha Turman, Ph.D.

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