Ntozake Shange exploded onto the creative scene with her debut poem “for colored girls who considered suicide/when the rain is enuf,” and became a Black feminist icon in the process.
Shange was born Paulette L. Williams in Trenton, New Jersey in 1948, moving to St. Louis with her family as a child. Her middle-class upbringing exposed her to some of the greatest Black minds of the time including Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, Chuck Berry, and W.E.B. Du Bois among others.
As a teen, she returned to New Jersey to complete high school, then enrolled in Barnard College in New York. After graduating, she traveled west to attend graduate school at the University of South California in Los Angeles.
A failed first marriage threw Shange into a depression in the early ’70’s, culminating in the changing of her name. Ntozake, from the Xhosa language, translates into “she who has her own things” and Shange which translates into “he/she who walks with lions.”(READ MORE)
