Ntozake Shange

This reflective story by poet Ntozake Shange looks back at the great Black thinkers and innovators who visited her father's house. "A close-knit group of Black innovators formed their own community in the early to mid-twentieth century. These men of vision lived at a time when the color of their skin dictated where they could live, what schools they could attend, and even where they could sit on a bus or in a movie theater.Yet in the face of this...

Collects more than sixty original and selected poems that frequently deal with such difficult subjects as rape, abortion, suicide, and domestic violence, with Spanish translations on facing pages.

Groundbreaking and heartbreaking, this triumphant novel by two of America's most acclaimed storytellers follows a family of women from enslavement to the dawn of the twenty-first century.
From Reconstruction to both world wars, from the Harlem Renaissance to Vietnam, from spirituals and arias to torch songs and the blues, Some Sing, Some Cry brings to life the monumental story of one American family's journey from slavery into

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Ntokaze Shange's most beloved novel, Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo, is the story of three "colored girls," three sisters and their mama from Charleston, South Carolina: Sassafrass, the oldest, a poet and a weaver like her mother, gone north to college, living with other artists in Los Angeles and trying to weave a life out of her work, her man, her memories and dreams; Cypress, the dancer, who leaves home to find new ways of moving and easing the contractions...

"With astonishing lyrical beauty and dramatic intensity, Ntozake Shange tells the story of thirteen-year-old Betsey Brown, a colored girl poised between the enchanted world of childhood and the passionate promises, romantic and political, of the adult world. Set in the colored community of St. Louis in 1959, the year school integration disrupted everybody's lives, Shange's story traces the stress lines created in black families not only by racism...

A young African-American girl is traumatized when a gang attacks her and her brother on their way home from school and spray-paints her face white. Based on a true story.

Songs of love and urban tragedy from one of the preeminent African-American writers of our time. Shange's poems express the need to be felt and heard, to be necessary. In this love space, we all wear our desires, t-cells, and hearts on our sleeves and experience all that comes with wanting to get hold of life, or someone to love.