Ntozake Shange is a renowned poet, playwright, novelist, and performance artist. Her groundbreaking work, based on the contemporary experience of black women, has cemented her reputation as a powerful American feminist and literary figure. Her style is distinctive and idiosyncratic. As a writer, she does not want her readers to have control over the reading process. She once said that that she hoped her readers would struggle to understand her meaning. She writes what she hears in her mind, revealing the “music beneath the words.”
Shange was born Paulette Williams to an upper middle class family in Trenton, New Jersey in 1948. When she was 8, her father, an Air Force surgeon, and her...
