This year, the U.S. Book Show moves to Harlem on the heels of the centennial anniversary of the Harlem Renaissance. Much has happened in the neighborhood since the seminal works of Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, Arturo Alfonso Schomburg, and others first brought the area international literary acclaim, from the 1960s race riots to the era of rapid gentrification that began in the 1990s. Yet as the stewards of the upper Manhattan neighborhood’s literary institutions look to preserve the past and embrace the future, they say there are plenty more stories to tell.

Visitors to Harlem today can still see some of the storied spaces where literary greats once premiered creative works, says scholar Vanessa K. Valdés, author of the biography Diasporic Blackness: The Life and Times of Arturo Alfonso Schomburg, pointing to such institutions as the City College of New York and Apollo Theater: “Recognition of the spaces’ history is also what continues Harlem’s relevance for cultural producers as we move forward.”

While many creative and educational institutions of the Harlem Renaissance era have closed, others have opened up and adapted to the times, finding ways to engage a new generation of book fans. “Now,” Valdés noted, “everybody is on TikTok.”

Still, a number of bricks-and-mortar spaces carry on the neighborhood’s literary legacy. Independent bookstores Revolution Books, Sister’s Uptown Bookstore, and the Word-Up Community Bookshop are among a tight-knit group of spaces that regularly host book readings and sponsor writers groups including the Harlem Writers Guild.

The Studio Museum, founded in 1968 “to address the near-complete exclusion of artists of African descent from mainstream museums, commercial art galleries, academic institutions, and scholarly publications,” per its website, is set to reopen this fall after eight years of renovations. And the neighborhood’s libraries have added historical literacy programming on the Harlem Renaissance for children, including the Junior Scholars Program at the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

For Harlem Book Fair founder Max Rodriguez, putting the literary history of the neighborhood front and center has been a central component of his career—including through the fair itself, which is held each fall and is now entering its 27th year.

“Always, we have new conversations that reflect our current social fracture,” says Rodriguez, who is also the founder of QBR, the Black Book Review. He says his “wish” for the fair is for it to “stand on our ancestor’s shoulders, then project and create anew.” Harlem’s literary fixtures today, he explained, must “acknowledge the place from which we grow, but also project ourselves into the future.”

Precisely that sort of work is ongoing at the Zora Neale Hurston Trust, where a two-day February summit hosted at the author’s alma mater Barnard College served to introduce one of the leading lights of the Harlem Renaissance to contemporary audiences in a new way. It was the first and only event produced on behalf of Hurston’s family.

“My work is connecting people with Zora herself,” says Hurston scholar Rae Chesny, who led the summit as the former director of programs for the trust. “When people say they love Zora, what they really mean is they love Their Eyes Were Watching God. But they don’t know the details around how that work came to be and the challenges she faced in her life.”

Some, Chesny suggested, see Harlem as a cultural hub “frozen in time” around its Renaissance. That perspective, she added, belies an understanding of the nuances of the neighborhood, where the literary culture never stopped evolving: “There’s so many amazing institutions and organizations and individuals fighting to hold on to that history, and to birth something new from this very rich tapestry that is Harlem.”

In some cases, what is old is also new. In recent years, the Hurston Trust has worked with Amistad Press, described by its corporate parent HarperCollins as “the oldest imprint devoted to titles for the African American market at any major New York publishing house,” to posthumously publish several of Hurston’s unpublished works. Those include a work of nonfiction, 2018’s Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo”; a story collection, 2020’s Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick; and the unfinished novel The Life of Herod the Great, which was released in January.

On the children’s book side, author and scholar Ibram X. Kendi has also adapted several of Hurston’s posthumously released works for younger audiences. Those include 2022’s Magnolia Flower, a picture book illustrated by Loveis Wise adapting a short story collected in Crooked Stick, and an illustrated middle grade edition of Barracoon that hit shelves last year.

“Those are really wonderful books for children, and to cultivate a new audience,” says Hurston’s grandniece, Lois Hurston Gaston. She considers Harlem to be where Hurston—who was born and raised in Alabama and Florida, respectively, before moving to Harlem in the mid-1920s—fully formed her voice. And it’s important, she added, for modern institutions to continue to highlight that legacy.

“It never really had a name, the Harlem Renaissance,” Gaston says. “But it’s ongoing. I think that it was an awakening that has never died, never gone to sleep again.”

Emell Derra Adolphus is a Brooklyn-based writer, journalist, and recipient of the Kresge Artist Fellowship in literary arts.