Author Ntozake Shange of 'For Coloured Girls' fame has died

NEW YORK (AP):

Playwright, poet and author Ntozake Shange, whose most acclaimed theatre piece is the 1975 Tony Award-nominated play For Coloured Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuf, died Saturday, according to her daughter. She was 70 years old.

Shange's For Coloured Girls, describes the racism, sexism, violence and rape experienced by seven black women. It has been influential to generations of progressive thinkers, from #MeToo architect Tarana Burke, to Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Lynn Nottage. After learning of Shange's death, Nottage called her "our warrior poet/dramatist."

Savannah Shange, a professor of anthropology at the University of California at Santa Cruz, said Saturday that her mother died in her sleep at an assisted living facility in Bowie, Maryland. She had suffered a series of strokes in 2004.

"She spoke for, and in fact embodied, the ongoing struggle of black women and girls to live with dignity and respect in the context of systemic racism, sexism and oppression," Shange said.

For Coloured Girls, is an interwoven series of poetic monologues set to music Shange coined the form a "choreopoem" for it by African-American women, each identified only by a colour that she wears.

It played some 750 performances on Broadway only the second play by an African-American woman after, A Raisin in the Sun and was turned into a feature film by Tyler Perry starring Thandie Newton, Anika Noni Rose, Kerry Washington and Janet Jackson.

Born Paulette Williams in Trenton, New Jersey, she went on to graduate from Barnard College and got a master's degree from the University of southern California. Her father, Dr Paul T. Williams, was a surgeon. Her mother, Eloise Owens Williams, was a professor of social work. She later assumed a new Zulu name: Ntozake meaning "She who comes with her own things" and Shange means "She who walks like a lion."

The New York Times reviewer called For Coloured Girls "extraordinary and wonderful" and "a very humbling but inspiring thing for a white man to experience." It earned Shange an Obie Award, and she won a second such award in 198,1 for her adaptation of Bertolt Brecht's Mother Courage and Her Children at the Public Theater.

Her other 15 plays include: A Photograph: A Study of Cruelty (1977), Boogie Woogie Landscapes (1977), Spell No. 7 (1979) and Black and White Two Dimensional Planes (1979). Her list of published works includes 19 poetry collections, six novels, five children's books and three collections of essays.

Shange taught at Brown University, Rice University, Villanova University, DePaul University, Prairie View University and Sonoma State University. She also lectured at Yale, Howard, New York University, among others.