Ntozake Shange

Ntozake Shange is a Top 30 AALBC.com Bestselling Author Making Our List 16 Times

Ntozake Shange, born Paulette Williams on October 18, 1948 in Trenton, NJ. She attended Barnard College (B.A., 1970) and the University of Southern California (M.A., 1973). She taught humanities, women’s studies, and Afro-American studies at California colleges from 1972 to 1975. During this period she also made public appearances as a dancer and reciter of poetry. Her 1975 theatre piece For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf quickly brought her fame.

For Colored Girls is a group of 20 poems for seven actors on the power of black women to survive in the face of despair and pain. It ran for seven months Off-Broadway in New York City and moved to Broadway and was subsequently produced throughout the United States and on television.

She lives in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn New York and is the sister of award-winning playwright Ifa Bayeza.

Ntozake Shange, passed away peacefully in her sleep, October 27, 2018, in Bowie, MD