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Ntozake Shange

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Ntozake Shange (/ˌɛntoʊˈzɑːki ˈʃɑːŋɡeɪ/ EN-toh-ZAH-kee SHAHNG-Ê;[1] October 18, 1948 – October 27, 2018) was an American playwright and poet.[2] As a Black feminist, she addressed issues relating to race and Black power in much of her work. She is best known for her Obie Award–winning play, for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf (1975). She also penned novels including Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo (1982), Liliane (1994), and Betsey Brown (1985), about an African-American girl run away from home.

Ntozake Shange
Shange in 1978
Born
Paulette Linda Williams

(1948-10-18)October 18, 1948
Trenton, New Jersey, U.S.
DiedOctober 27, 2018(2018-10-27) (aged 70)
Bowie, Maryland, U.S.
EducationColumbia University (BA)
University of Southern California (MA)
Occupations
  • Playwright
  • author
  • poet
Known forfor colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf (1975)
RelativesIfa Bayeza (sister)
Bisa Williams (sister)
Websiteofficialntozakeshange.com

Among Shange's honors and awards were fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and Lila Wallace Reader's Digest Fund, a Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, and a Pushcart Prize. In April 2016, Barnard College announced that it had acquired Shange's archive.[3]

Early life

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Shange was born Paulette Linda Williams in Trenton, New Jersey,[4] to an upper-middle-class family. Her father, Paul T. Williams, was a surgeon, and her mother, Eloise Williams, was an educator and a psychiatric social worker. When she was aged eight, Shange's family moved to the racially segregated city of St. Louis. As a result of the Brown v. Board of Education court decision, Shange was bused to a white school where she endured racism and racist attacks.

Shange's family had a strong interest in the arts and encouraged her artistic education. Among the guests at their home were Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, Chuck Berry, Paul Robeson, and W. E. B. Du Bois.[5][6] From an early age, Shange took an interest in poetry.[7] While growing up with her family in Trenton, Shange attended poetry readings with her younger sister Wanda (now known as the playwright Ifa Bayeza).[8] These poetry readings fostered an early interest for Shange in the South in particular, and the loss it represented to young Black children who migrated to the North with their parents.[7] In 1956, Shange's family moved to St. Louis, Missouri, where Shange was sent several miles away from home to a non-segregated school that allowed her to receive "gifted" education. While attending this non-segregated school, Shange faced overt racism and harassment. These experiences would later go on to heavily influence her work.[6]

When Shange was 13, she returned to Lawrence Township, Mercer County, New Jersey,[9] where she graduated in 1966 from Trenton Central High School.[10] In 1966, Shange enrolled at Barnard College (class of 1970) at Columbia University in New York City. During her time at Barnard, Shange met fellow Barnard student and would-be poet Thulani Davis.[11] The two poets would later go on to collaborate on various works.[11] Shange graduated cum laude in American Studies, then earned a master's degree in the same field from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. However, her college years were not all pleasant. She married during her first year in college, but the marriage did not last long. Depressed over her separation and with a strong sense of bitterness and alienation, she attempted suicide.[12]

In 1970 in San Francisco, having come to terms with her depression and alienation, Shange rejected "Williams" as a slave name and "Paulette" (after her father Paul) as patriarchal, and asked South African musicians Ndikho and Nomusa Xaba[13] to bestow an African name.[14] In 1971, Ndikho duly chose Ntozake and Shange,[14] which Shange respectively glossed as Xhosa "She who comes with her own things" and Zulu "She who walks like a lion".[14][15]

Career

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In 1975, Shange moved back to New York City, after earning her master's degree in American Studies in 1973[16] from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, California. She is acknowledged as having been a founding poet of the Nuyorican Poets Café.[17] In that year her first and most well-known play was produced — for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf. First produced Off-Broadway, the play soon moved on to Broadway at the Booth Theater and won several awards, including the Obie Award, Outer Critics Circle Award, and the AUDELCO Award. This play, her most famous work, was a 20-part choreopoem — a term Shange coined to describe her groundbreaking dramatic form, combining of poetry, dance, music, and song[18] — that chronicled the lives of women of color in the United States. The poem was eventually made into the stage play, was then published in book form in 1977. In 2010, the choreopoem was adapted into a film (For Colored Girls, directed by Tyler Perry).

Shange subsequently wrote other successful plays, including Spell No. 7, a 1979 choreopoem that explores the Black experience,[19] and an adaptation of Bertolt Brecht's Mother Courage and Her Children (1980), which won an Obie Award.[20]

In 1978, Shange became an associate of the Women's Institute for Freedom of the Press (WIFP).[21] WIFP is an American nonprofit publishing organization. The organization works to increase communication between women and connect the public with forms of women-based media. Shange taught in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston from 1984 to 1986. While there, she wrote the ekphrastic poetry collection Ridin' the Moon in Texas: Word Paintings and served as thesis advisor for poet and playwright Annie Finch.

Shange edited The Beacon Best of 1999: creative writing by women and men of all colors (Beacon Press, ISBN 978-0-8070-6221-0), which featured the work of Dorothy Allison, Junot Díaz, Rita Dove, Louise Erdrich, Martín Espada, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Ha Jin, Jamaica Kincaid, Barbara Kingsolver, Yusef Komunyakaa, Hanif Kureishi, Marjorie Sandor, John Edgar Wideman, and others.[22]

In 2003, Shange wrote and oversaw the production of Lavender Lizards and Lilac Landmines: Layla's Dream while serving as a visiting artist at the University of Florida, Gainesville.[23]

Shange's individual poems, essays, and short stories have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, including The Black Scholar, Yardbird, Ms., Essence Magazine, The Chicago Tribune, VIBE, and Third-World Women, and Daughters of Africa (edited by Margaret Busby, 1992.[5][7][24]

Relationship to the Black Arts Movement

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Although Shange is described as a "post-Black artist", her work was decidedly feminist, whereas the Black Arts Movement has been criticized as misogynistic and "sexism had been widely and hotly debated within movement publications and organizations."[25] Amiri Baraka—one of the leading male figures of the movement—denied her as a post-Black artist.[25] With regard to Shange as a part of the black aesthetic and as a post-Black artist, he claimed "that several women writers, among them Michelle Wallace [sic] and Ntozake Shange, like [Ishmael] Reed, had their own 'Hollywood' aesthetic, one of 'capitulation' and 'garbage.'"[25]

Honors

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Among Shange's honors and awards were fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and Lila Wallace Reader's Digest Fund, a Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, and a Pushcart Prize. In April 2016, Barnard College announced that it had acquired Shange's archive.[3]

Personal life and death

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Shange lived in Brooklyn, New York.[26] Shange had one daughter, Savannah Shange. Shange was married twice: to the jazz saxophonist David Murray and the painter McArthur Binion, Savannah's father, with both marriages ending in divorce.[4]

Shange died in her sleep on October 27, 2018, aged 70, in an assisted-living facility in Bowie, Maryland.[4] She had been ill, having suffered a series of strokes in 2004,[27] but she "had been on the mend lately, creating new work, giving readings and being feted for her work."[28] Her sister Ifa Bayeza (with whom she co-wrote the 2010 novel Some Sing, Some Cry)[29] said: "It's a huge loss for the world. I don't think there's a day on the planet when there's not a young woman who discovers herself through the words of my sister."[28]

Awards

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Nominations

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Works

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Plays

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Poetry

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  • Melissa & Smith (1976)
  • Natural Disasters and Other Festive Occasions (1977)
  • Where the Mississippi Meets the Amazon (1977)
  • Nappy Edges (1978)
  • Black and White Two Dimensional Planes (1979)[39]
  • A Daughter's Geography (1983)
  • From Okra to Greens (1984)
  • Ridin' the Moon in Texas: Word Paintings (St. Martin's Press, 1987)
  • The Love Space Demands (a continuing saga) (St. Martin's Press, 1987)
  • A Photograph: Lovers in Motion: A Drama (S. French, 1977)
  • Some Men (1981)
  • Three Pieces (St. Martin's Press, 1992)
  • I Live in Music (1994)
  • The Sweet Breath of Life: A Poetic Narrative of the African-American Family (Atria Books, 2004). Photography by Kamoinge Inc.
  • "Enuf"
  • "With No Immediate Cause"
  • "you are sucha fool"
  • "People of Watts" (first published November 1993 in VIBE Magazine)
  • "Blood Rhythms"
  • "Poet Hero"
  • Wild Beauty (Atria Books, 2017)
  • Freedom's a-Callin Me (Harper Collins, 2012 ISBN 9780061337437)

Novels

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Film

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Children's books

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  • Coretta Scott (2009)
  • Ellington Was Not a Street (2003)
  • Float Like a Butterfly: Muhammad Ali, the Man Who Could Float Like a Butterfly and Sting Like a Bee (2002)
  • Daddy Says (2003)
  • Whitewash (1997)

Essays and non-fiction

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Notes

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  1. ^ First produced under the title A Photograph: A Still Life With Shadows/ A Photograph: A Study in Cruelty in 1977. Produced under the current title A Photograph: Lovers in Motion by the Equinox Theatre in Houston, Texas, in 1979.
  2. ^ First presented as a one-woman piece at the New York Shakespeare Festival's Poetry at the Public series on December 18, 1978. Presented in play form at the Symphony Space Theatre as a fundraiser for The Frank Silvera Writer's Workshop on June 26, 1979.
  3. ^ Published in Love's Fire: Seven New Plays Inspired by Seven Shakespearean Sonnets (1998). Inspired by Shakespeare's Sonnet 128.

References

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  1. ^ Ntozake Shange Biography, FilmReference.com. Retrieved October 27, 2018.
  2. ^ Lester, Neal A. (Winter 1990), "At the Heart of Shange's Feminism: An Interview", Black American Literature Forum, 24(4: Women Writers Issue): 717–730. JSTOR 3041798.
  3. ^ a b Gans, Andrew (April 18, 2016). "Barnard College Acquires Archives of Ntozake Shange". Playbill. Retrieved April 19, 2016.
  4. ^ a b c Collins-Hughes, Laura (October 28, 2018). "Ntozake Shange, Who Wrote 'For Colored Girls,' Is Dead at 70". The New York Times. Retrieved April 7, 2020.
  5. ^ a b "Ntozake Shange". The History Makers. 2016–2017. Retrieved April 12, 2022.
  6. ^ a b Kosseh-Kamada, Mafo. "Ntozake Shange Biography". University of Minnesota. Retrieved May 12, 2014.
  7. ^ a b c Blackwell, Henry (1979). "An Interview with Ntozake Shange". Black American Literature Forum. 13 (4): 134–138. doi:10.2307/3041478. JSTOR 3041478.
  8. ^ Levin, Anne (March 27, 2013), "Author Ifa Bayeza Comes 'Home' at Library Reading and Book Signing", Town Topics.
  9. ^ Lee, Felicia R. (September 17, 2010), "A Writer's Struggles, On and Off the Page", The New York Times: "The sisters were raised in St. Louis and in Lawrence Township, N.J., the oldest of four children of a surgeon, Paul T. Williams, and Eloise O. Williams, a social worker, and educator who also had a fondness for the arts."
  10. ^ Aubrey, Dan. "In Memoriam: Ntozake Shange", Princeton Info, October 31, 2018. Accessed May 7, 2020. "She graduated from Trenton Central High School in 1966 and received degrees from Barnard College and the University of Southern California."
  11. ^ a b Fleischmann, Stephanie (October 1, 1990). "Thulani Davis". Bomb. Retrieved May 12, 2014.
  12. ^ Holloway, Lynette (October 15, 2010), "Interview With An Author: Ntozake Shange Returns to the Spotlight With Epic Novel and Film Adaptation of Groundbreaking 'For Colored Girls'", BV on Books.
  13. ^ Ansell, Gwen (June 20, 2019). "Farewell to Ndikho Xaba — a little known genius of South African music". The Conversation. Retrieved July 14, 2022.
  14. ^ a b c Shange, Ntozake (November 23, 2020). "Ntozake Shange on Sun Ra and How She Came to Have Her Name". Literary Hub. Retrieved July 14, 2022.
  15. ^ "About Ntozake Shange". Official Ntozake Shange Website. Global Artists Management. Retrieved July 14, 2022.
  16. ^ Kosseh-Kamanda, Mafo. "Ntozake Shange: Biography/Criticism". University of Minnesota. Retrieved April 23, 2014.
  17. ^ "History & Awards". Nuyorican Poets Cafe. Archived from the original on December 1, 2017. Retrieved December 3, 2017.
  18. ^ Carr, Jane (October 28, 2018), "What 'For Colored Girls' meant to us", CNN.
  19. ^ Mahne, Theodore (April 22, 2013). "'Spell #7' offers a dated but passionate, poetic look at black experience". The Times-Picayune. Retrieved April 23, 2014.
  20. ^ Ramos, Dino-Ray (October 28, 2018). "Ntozake Shange Dies: The 'For Colored Girls' Playwright Was 70". Deadline Hollywood.
  21. ^ "Associates | The Women's Institute for Freedom of the Press". www.wifp.org. Retrieved June 21, 2017.
  22. ^ "The Beacon Best of 1999". Penguin Random House.
  23. ^ "Choreopoem returns home from Atlanta". The Gainesville Sun. June 13, 2003.
  24. ^ "New in Paperback". Washington Post. February 5, 1994.
  25. ^ a b c Salaam, Kaluma [sic] (1995). "Modern American Poetry | Historical Overviews of The Black Arts Movement". Department of English, University of Illinois. Archived from the original on July 22, 2018. Retrieved December 23, 2023.
  26. ^ Lee, Felicia R. (September 17, 2010), "A Writer's Struggles, On and Off the Page", The New York Times. Retrieved September 30, 2010.
  27. ^ Kennedy, Mark (October 27, 2018), "Author Ntozake Shange of 'For Colored Girls' fame has died", ABC News.
  28. ^ a b Preston, Rohan (October 27, 2018). "Ntozake Shange, pioneering playwright, poet and novelist, dies at 70". Star Tribune. Retrieved October 27, 2018.
  29. ^ Smith, Harrison (October 28, 2018), Shange, black feminist poet and playwright of ‘For Colored Girls,’ dies at 70", The Washington Post.
  30. ^ "Ntozake Shange", John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
  31. ^ "Complete List of Recipients (1945-Present)", Office of the Secretary of the University, Columbia University in the City of New York.
  32. ^ "Ntozake Shange, playwright who underscored struggles of black women in 'For Colored Girls,' dies at 70". Los Angeles Times. Associated Press. October 28, 2018.
  33. ^ "The Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Awards: The art of the possible..." (PDF). Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writers' Awards.
  34. ^ Wulf, Steve (March 23, 2015). "Supersisters: Original Roster". ESPN. Retrieved June 4, 2015.
  35. ^ "St. Louis Walk of Fame Inductees". St. Louis Walk of Fame. Archived from the original on October 31, 2012. Retrieved April 25, 2013.
  36. ^ "I found god in myself: A Conversation with Ntozake Shange", Souleo Universe, November 11, 2016.
  37. ^ "Announcing the winner of the 2018 Shelley Memorial Award, Ntozake Shange". Poetry Society of America. April 18, 2018. Retrieved May 3, 2021.
  38. ^ Gilbert, Andrew. "Alta, 'Shameless Hussy' and Founder of Nation's First Feminist Press, Dies at 81". KQEDdate=March 26, 2024. Retrieved October 19, 2024.
  39. ^ Shange, Ntozake (February 1979). "Black & White Two-Dimensional Planes". Callaloo. 5 (Women Poets: A Special Issue): 56–62. doi:10.2307/2930568. JSTOR 2930568.
  40. ^ Persico, Joyce J., "Ntozake Shange and Ifa Bayeza — the erstwhile Williams siblings of Trenton — mark careers with new novel, film", NJ.com, October 9, 2010.

Further reading

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