Ntozake Shange declares herself a poet first and playwright second. She is also a dancer, actor.
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Ntozake Shange
Fearless poet, playwright and Obie Award-winning author has given women and girls of color honest
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Ntozake Shange declares herself a poet first and playwright second. She is also a dancer, actor, director, author, lecturer, and black feminist. In 1971, she adopted the name “Ntozake Shange,” pronounced En-toe-zok-ee Shan-gay, from Xhosa, a Zulu dialect, which signifies “she who comes into her own things” (Ntozake) and “she who walks like a lion” (Shange). In a 1990 interview with Neal A. Lester, Shange explains, “I’m a firm believer that language and how we use language determines how we act, and how we act then determines our lives and other people’s lives. ”
Shange was born Paulette Williams in Trenton, New Jersey, on October 18, 1948. Her mother Eloise, an educator and social worker, and her father Paul, a sports physician, contributed to the rich intellectual environment surrounding Shange’s childhood. Shange recalls as a child the family friends who often frequented their home, names like Dizzy Gillespie, Paul Robeson, Walter White, and W.E.B. Dubois. “I used to sit up on the stairway in the front of the house and watch the people come in and I could listen to the talk going on in the back” (Interview with Brenda Lyons, 1986). During these same years, Shange and her sister attended poetry readings. Even at a young age, she began to analyze and critique the poetry she had heard. At one reading, Shange recalls the poetry of women who had formerly been raised in the South. “We were getting very upset by what, in our ignorance, we saw as their romanticization of Southern living. And I was saying to myself, if it was as wonderful as all that, why in the hell did you all come up here” (Interview with Henry Blackwell)?
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An Evening With Ntozake Shange.
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Her Pen is a Machete: The Art of Ntozake Shange
NTOZAKE SHANGE, poet, playwright, performer, and novelist
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