Ntozake Shange

BORN: OCTOBER 18, 1948, TRENTON, NJ

DIED: OCTOBER 27, 2018, BOWIE, MD

I found god in myself / and I loved her /…fiercely.

Poet, novelist, playwright, performance artist, and educator Ntozake Shange’s unique voice and feminist approach to literature achieved widespread acclaim when her choreopoem, for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf, was first produced on Broadway in 1975. In that production, seven nameless women dressed in colors of the rainbow spoke in twenty poems, monologues, and dance about vital issues confronted by Black women. This included themes related to artistic expression, body image, race, skin color, and male-female relationships. In the years that followed, for colored girls continued to be a critical success throughout the United States and Europe. It became a part of women’s studies curricula and was adapted for television and film. for colored girls is considered a landmark and a classic in American theater, and it won an Obie Award for its off-Broadway production at the Public Theater.

The play’s phenomenal success helped to propel Ntozake’s forty-plus-year career as a writer and educator. She was an award-winning author of adult novels, plays, performance pieces, and children’s books, including Sassafrass Cypress & Indigo, Ellington Was Not a Street, Float Like a Butterfly, Whitewash, We Troubled the Waters, and Freedom’s a-Callin’ Me. She also taught and lectured at colleges and universities throughout the country.

Whether writing for adults or for children, Ntozake’s works have always been informed by the literary, musical, and intellectual influences of her family experiences and the turbulent political and feminist ideologies of the 1960s and ’70s. Born in New Jersey, she was named Paulette Linda Williams. Her parents’ friends included a host of notable African American and Latinx influencers. In 1971, she changed what she considered a slave name to Ntozake Shange, which in Xhosa and Zulu means “she who comes with her own things and walks like a lion.” Ntozake continued to embrace cultural influences from the African diaspora in her literary works, while teaching and working as a performance artist in California.

Ntozake struggled with undiagnosed bipolar disorder during her young adulthood and beyond. After a series of strokes and an autoimmune disease, she resumed her writing career, publishing her last volume of poetry, Wild Beauty, in 2015.