04 Feb 2021

Ntozake Shange

Black Authors post, Day 4.

Black Authors post, Day 4.

Today’s author is poet and playwright Ntozake Shange.

Ntozake was born Paulette Linda Williams, in Trenton NJ, in 1948. When Ntozake was young, her parents moved to St. Louis, MO, which was racially segregated. As a result of Brown Vs. The Board of Education court case, she was bussed to an all-White school, where she endured racist attacks and abuse. After high school, Ntozake went to Barnard College, where she studied American Studies, and came in contact with many of the radical movements that were going on at the time (antiwar, feminism, the Black Liberation movement, etc.). She earned her MA in American Studies from University of California, Los Angeles. During this time in her life, Ntozake was dealing with strong depression. To help come to terms with her depression, she changed her name in 1971. In Zulu, Ntozake means “she who comes with her own things” and Shange means “who walks like a lion.”

After she moved to New York City in 1975, she became one of the founding poets of Nuyorican Poets Cafe. That same year, her first play/choreopoem, For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf, was produced. It soon moved to Broadway and won several awards, including an Obie Awards and an Outer Critics Circle award. Ntozake then went on to have a very prolific career, writing 15 plays, 19 poetry collections, 6 novels, 5 children’s books, 3 collections of essays, and a partial memoir. She taught at Rice University, Villanova University College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and Depaul University, and guest lectured at many others. Ntozake died in 2018, after having been ill after suffering from a series of strokes in 2004.

Some of my favorite Ntozake Shange works:

A note: These Amazon links point to Amazon Smile, Amazon’s affiliate charity program. If you have not set up Amazon Smile, I encourage you to point it to an organization like Code Savvy, which is a Twin-cities based organization that helps connect kids to coding.

Some links: