Ntozake Shange Quotes
When I die, I will not be guilty of having left a generation of girls behind thinking that anyone can tend to their emotional health other than themselves.
Shange, Ntozake. Interview by Claudia Tate. Black Women Writers at Work, edited by Claudia Tate, Continuum, 1983.
Ntozake Shange was an American playwright and poet. As a Black feminist, she addressed issues relating to race and Black power in much of her work. She is best known for her Obie Award-winning play, For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf. She also penned novels including Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo (1982), Liliane (1994), and Betsey Brown (1985), about an African-American girl runaway from home. Among Shange's honors and awards were fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and 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 it had acquired Shange's archive. Shange lived in Brooklyn, New York. Shange had one daughter, Savannah Shange. She was married twice: to the saxophonist David Murray and the painter McArthur Binion, Savannah’s father, with both marriages ending in divorce.
