Ntozake Shange was an American playwright and poet.
19 Facts About Ntozake Shange
2.
Ntozake Shange was married twice: to the saxophonist David Murray and the painter McArthur Binion, Savannah's father, with both marriages ending in divorce.
3.
Ntozake Shange was born Paulette Linda Williams in Trenton, New Jersey, to an upper-middle-class family.
4.
Ntozake Shange's father, Paul T Williams, was a surgeon, and her mother, Eloise Williams, was an educator and a psychiatric social worker.
5.
When she was aged eight, Ntozake Shange's family moved to the racially segregated city of St Louis.
6.
Ntozake Shange's family had a strong interest in the arts and encouraged her artistic education.
7.
From an early age, Ntozake Shange took an interest in poetry.
8.
In 1956, Ntozake Shange's family moved to St Louis, Missouri, where Ntozake Shange was sent several miles away from home to a non-segregated school that allowed her to receive "gifted" education.
9.
When Ntozake Shange was 13, she returned to Lawrence Township, Mercer County, New Jersey, where she graduated in 1966 from Trenton Central High School.
10.
In 1966, Ntozake Shange enrolled at Barnard College at Columbia University in New York City.
11.
Ntozake Shange married during her first year in college, but the marriage did not last long.
12.
In 1970 in San Francisco, having come to terms with her depression and alienation, Ntozake Shange rejected "Williams" as a slave name and "Paulette" as patriarchal, and asked South African musicians Ndikho and Nomusa Xaba to bestow an African name.
13.
In 1975, Ntozake Shange moved back to New York City, after earning her master's degree in American Studies in 1973 from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, California.
14.
Ntozake Shange is acknowledged as having been a founding poet of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe.
15.
Ntozake Shange subsequently wrote other successful plays, including Spell No 7, a 1979 choreopoem that explores the Black experience, and an adaptation of Bertolt Brecht's Mother Courage and Her Children, which won an Obie Award.
16.
In 1978, Ntozake Shange became an associate of the Women's Institute for Freedom of the Press.
17.
Ntozake Shange taught in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston from 1984 to 1986.
18.
In 2003, Ntozake 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.
19.
Ntozake Shange died in her sleep on October 27,2018, aged 70, in an assisted-living facility in Bowie, Maryland.