2024
Follow Me Through Florida: The Journey of the Black Federal Writers
In Black Hibiscus, ed. John Lowe · University of Mississippi Press
Author · Historian · Biographer
Recovering the
Lost Voices
of America
Pamela G. Bordelon, PhD, has spent the last three decades recovering the lost voices of the WPA writers, voices that illuminate American life from the people's own point of view.
Photographs: Library of Congress · Farm Security Administration · Public Domain
Featured In
- The New York Times
- Library Journal
- W. W. Norton
- African American Review
Edited Volume
Go Gator and Muddy the Water
W. W. Norton · 1999
This volume presents Zora Neale Hurston's Federal Writers' Project folklore and writings, a body of material that had never before been published.
Edited and with a biographical essay by Pamela Bordelon, the volume restores a part of Hurston's life that had remained half in shadow. Here are her Federal Writers' Project contributions set against the architecture of her life, the challenges of the 1930s, and a lively discussion of why these writings matter.
About
A Decades-Long Search Recovering Writings That Almost Were Not Saved
Pamela G. Bordelon, PhD is a literary scholar, author, and editor whose work centers on the Federal Writers' Project and its place in the larger story of American life and letters. Her focus falls on the people who shaped the project, its work in the southern United States, and its contributions to oral history.
Published by W. W. Norton and featured in the African American Review and the University of Mississippi Press, her scholarship sits at the intersection of biography, history, and the recovery of primary sources that reshape the historical record. Her 1991 LSU dissertation has been downloaded more than 2,800 times since 2017, when the count began, and remains a foundational text in the field.
She has worked extensively in the National Archives, the Library of Congress, and the Florida, Mississippi, and Louisiana archives, recovering lost voices. These are ordinary lives rarely examined: peddlers, day laborers, ship loaders, seafood processors, muskrat trappers, and former slaves adjusting to Jim Crow America. Working-class people who tell us about making a living as tenant and truck farmers, shopkeepers and bootblacks. In Louisiana, they speak of Marie Laveau and the Black Church.
Books & Publications
Selected Works
Essay
1999
Go Gator and Muddy the Water
Writings by Zora Neale Hurston from the Federal Writers' Project, edited and with a biographical essay by Pamela Bordelon · W. W. Norton & Company
1997
New Tracks on Dust Tracks: Toward a Reinterpretation of Zora Neale Hurston
African American Review · Seminal article establishing new biographical discoveries, including Hurston's true birthdate
1991
The Federal Writers' Project's Mirror to America: The Florida Reflection
PhD Dissertation, Louisiana State University · 2,359 downloads with 514 abstract views via LSU Scholarly Repository
Current Work
The biography the field has been waiting for
Zora Neale Hurston: A Biography
Manuscript in Progress
ProgressOne-third complete
First chapter published in the African American Review.
The two existing Hurston biographies are long on literary analysis and short on life. This one corrects that, drawing on years of original archival research across Florida and Louisiana.
It restores the years the record lost and reframes Hurston not only as a novelist but as a working folklorist of the Federal Writers' Project.
The result is the first full account that puts the life back into the literature.
Listed alongside Henry Louis Gates Jr. in the Cambridge bibliography of Hurston scholarship, essential reading in the field.
True Birthdate
Established from a family Bible, correcting the record.
The Hidden Decade
Recovers the lost years after her mother's death in 1904.
Federal Writers' Project
Restores her WPA folklore years to the public record for the first time.
Contact
Publishing Inquiries
For manuscript submissions, permissions, or press inquiries, please reach out directly.
Info@PamelaBordelon.com