May this dress remind us of the presence of magic ....

below is a short bio and link to read more about:

Ntozake Shange

Ntozake Shange was born Paulette Williams into an upper middle-class African American family. Her father was an Air Force surgeon and her mother a psychiatric social worker. Cultural icons such as Dizzie Gillepsie, Miles Davis, and W.E.B. DuBois were regular guests in the Williams home. Shange attended Barnard College and the University of Southern California, earning both a BA and MA in American Studies. Shange’s college years were difficult, however; frustrated and hurt after separating from her first husband, she attempted suicide several times before focusing her rage against the limitations society imposes on Black women. While earning an MA degree, she reaffirmed her personal strength based on a self-determined identity and took her African name, which means “she who comes with her own things” and she “who walks like a lion.” Shange would go on to a successful triple career as an educator, performer/director, and writer whose work drew heavily on her experiences of being a Black female in America.

Shange was perhaps most famous for her play For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf (1975). A unique blend of poetry, music, dance and drama called a “choreopoem,” it “took the theatre world by storm,” noted Jacqueline Trescott in the Washington Post, as it “became an electrifying Broadway hit and provoked heated exchanges about the relationships between black men and women. ... Its form—seven women on the stage dramatizing poetry—was a refreshing slap at the traditional, one-two-three-act structures.” Mel Gussow, writing in the New York Times, stated that “Miss Shange was a pioneer in terms of her subject matter: the fury of black women at their double subjugation in white male America.” The play uses female dancers to dramatize poems that recall encounters with their classmates, lovers, rapists, abortionists, and latent killers. The women survive abuse and disappointment and come to recognize in each other the promise of a better future. The play received both enthusiastic reviews and criticism for its portrayal of African American men. However, “Shange’s poems aren’t war cries,” Jack Kroll wrote in a Newsweek review of the Public Theatre production of For Colored Girls. “They’re outcries filled with a controlled passion against the brutality that blasts the lives of ‘colored girls’—a phrase that in her hands vibrates with social irony and poetic beauty. These poems are political in the deepest sense, but there’s no dogma, no sentimentality, no grinding of false mythic axes.” Critic Edith Oliver of the New Yorker remarked, “The evening grows in dramatic power, encompassing, it seems, every feeling and experience a woman has ever had; strong and funny, it is entirely free of the rasping earnestness of most projects of this sort. The verses and monologues that constitute the program have been very well chosen—contrasting in mood yet always subtly building.” The play received an Obie Award, the Outer Critics Circle Award, and the AUDELCO Award as well as Tony, Grammy, and Emmy Award nominations. In 2010, director Tyler Perry adapted the choreo-poem into a feature-length film.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/ntozake-shange

“Where there is a woman there is magic.”

 Ntozake Shange

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