Ntozake Shange

Ntozake Shange, born Paulette Linda Williams on October 18, 1948, in Trenton, New Jersey, was an American playwright, poet, and Broadway book writer whose career spanned from 1976 to 2022. She died on October 27, 2018, at the age of 70, in an assisted-living facility in Bowie, Maryland, having suffered a series of strokes beginning in 2004. Her father, Paul T. Williams, was a surgeon, and her mother, Eloise Williams, worked as an educator and psychiatric social worker. The family, which had strong ties to the arts, hosted figures including Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, Chuck Berry, Paul Robeson, and W. E. B. Du Bois. When Shange was eight, the family relocated to St. Louis, Missouri, where she was bused to a non-segregated school as a result of the Brown v. Board of Education decision, an experience marked by overt racism and harassment that would later shape her work. She returned to New Jersey at age thirteen and graduated from Trenton Central High School in 1966.

Shange enrolled that same year at Barnard College, graduating cum laude in American Studies, and subsequently earned a master's degree in the same field from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles in 1973. Her college years included a brief marriage during her first year, and the depression that followed her separation led to suicide attempts. In 1970, living in San Francisco and having worked through that period, she rejected her birth name, viewing both "Paulette" and "Williams" as patriarchal and colonial respectively. South African musician Ndikho Xaba bestowed her new name in 1971: Ntozake, glossed from Xhosa as "She who comes with her own things," and Shange, from Zulu as "She who walks like a lion."

After returning to New York City in 1975, Shange became a founding poet of the Nuyorican Poets Café and produced her first and most celebrated work, for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf. The piece originated as a 20-part choreopoem — a term Shange coined to describe a dramatic form combining poetry, dance, music, and song — chronicling the lives of women of color in the United States. It moved from Off-Broadway to Broadway at the Booth Theater, where it earned the Obie Award, the Outer Critics Circle Award, and the AUDELCO Award. Its Broadway run brought Shange a Tony Award nomination for Best Play and a Drama Desk Award nomination for Unique Theatrical Experience, both in 1977. The work was published in book form that same year and adapted into a film directed by Tyler Perry in 2010.

Shange continued writing for the stage with Spell No. 7, a 1979 choreopoem examining the Black experience, and an adaptation of Bertolt Brecht's Mother Courage and Her Children in 1980, which won an Obie Award. In 1978, she became an associate of the Women's Institute for Freedom of the Press. Her prose fiction included the novels Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo (1982), Betsey Brown (1985), and Liliane (1994). She also edited The Beacon Best of 1999, an anthology featuring writers including Dorothy Allison, Junot Díaz, Rita Dove, and Jamaica Kincaid, among others.

Her academic career brought her to Rice University and then to the Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston from 1984 to 1986, where she wrote the poetry collection Ridin' the Moon in Texas: Word Paintings and served as thesis advisor for poet and playwright Annie Finch. She also taught or lectured at Prairie View A&M University, Brown University, Villanova University, DePaul University, Yale University, and Howard University. In 2003, she wrote and oversaw the production of Lavender Lizards and Lilac Landmines: Layla's Dream as a visiting artist at the University of Florida, Gainesville. Her poems, essays, and short stories appeared in publications including The Black Scholar, Ms., Essence Magazine, The Chicago Tribune, and VIBE.

Among her many honors were fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the 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 the acquisition of her archive. Shange lived in Brooklyn, New York, and had one daughter, Savannah Shange, with her second husband, painter McArthur Binion. She was also previously married to jazz saxophonist David Murray. Her sister is playwright Ifa Bayeza, with whom she co-wrote the 2010 novel Some Sing, Some Cry.