Alicia D. Williams: Hi. I'm Alicia D. Williams, the author of Jump at the Sun: The True Life Tale of Unstoppable Storycatcher Zora Neale Hurston. I have been a huge fan of stories and of folk tales and folklore. And once I discovered our own Black American folklore, it opened my eyes to Brer Rabbit and Brer Fox and Brer Gator, and all of these different characters way back in a time when animals talked just like us and wore clothes. And when I discovered that Zora Neale Hurston was the story catcher who helped collect this folklore, our chants and songs and games, from not just the South, but all over from The Bahamas and Haiti, I read her books. I became in love with her voice and her adventurous spirit. And I wanted to bring her story to life.

I started reading Zora Neal Hurston's books, and she had some wonderful books based off of herself, her autobiography. I started there. A lot of her books are based in Eatonville, her town that she grew up in. You get a sense of who she was, the people she grew up with. The characters and the lifestyles seemed so real because that's the way she was writing her whole life in just different ways. And I read her books, and I read what others had to say, scholars, as well as biographies and blogs and other articles.

My favorite thing is that Zora never gave up, no matter how much her father said, "Don't dream big," or people criticized her for being a woman and writing at that time. She was the first black woman filmmaker, the first black woman to graduate from Barnard College, the first black woman to publish during the Great Depression. When I saw all of these firsts, and with the obstacles for her as a woman, as well as a black woman to go through, I thought, "Oh, my gosh. I love her because she did not give up." And it's so true that her mom said to "Jump at the sun." I adore that because she never stopped jumping. And I think that's why that refrain is in the story. She never stopped. I love this idea of Zora being adventurous and being free to not care what the boxes that people tried to put her in. She broke out of them, and she reached the sun if you ask me.

I'd like to share the very beginning of my book, Jump at the Sun. This is when Zora was just a little girl:

In a town called Eatonville -- a place where magnolias smelled even prettier than they looked, oranges were as sweet as they were plump, and the people just plain ol' got along -- lived a girl who was attracted to tales like mosquitoes to skin. Zora was her name.

Zora got to loving tales from hearing the townsfolk swap stories at Joe Clarke's general store. Oftentimes Mama sent her over to fetch a li'l sugar or salt, and Zora would stall, make a ten-minute errand last an hour, just to overhear tales like how that trickster Brer Rabbit always got the best of Brer Fox. Only thing pulled her away was mama calling: 'Zora-a-a! if you don't come here, you better!'"