2018 Shelley Award

Ntozake Shange is an American poet, playwright, and novelist. Her poem "What Do You Believe A Poem Shd Do?" was featured in Poetry in Motion in 2015. Her play For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf (1975) is a unique blend of poetry, music, dance and drama called a "choreopoem," which "took the theatre world by storm" in 1975, as noted Jacqueline Trescott in the Washington Post. Shange's next productions, A Photograph: A Study of Cruelty (1977), Boogie Woogie Landscapes (1977), Spell No. 7 (1979) and Black and White Two Dimensional Planes (1979) impressed critics with their poetic quality.

Shange is the author of several poetry collections, including Nappy Edges (1978), which Washington Post Book World critic Harriet Gilbert praised by saying, "Nothing that Shange writes is ever entirely unreadable, springing, as it does, from such an intense honesty, from so fresh an awareness of the beauty of sound and of vision, from such mastery of words, from such compassion, humor and intelligence."

Shange's critically acclaimed novels include, Sassafrass, Cypress, and Indigo (1982), Betsey Brown (1985), and Liliane: Resurrection of the Daughter (1995). Her other works include The Love Space Demands, a choreopoem published in 1991; The Sweet Breath of Life: A Poetic Narrative of the African-American Family (2004), with photographs by the Kamoinge Workshop; the essay collections See No Evil: Prefaces, Essays, and Accounts 1976-1983 (1984) and If I Can Cook You Know God Can (1999); and four books for children: Whitewash (1997), the tribute to Mohammed Ali Float Like a Butterfly (2002), Ellington Was Not a Street (2003), and Daddy Says (2003). Shange also edited The Beacon Best of 1999, a collection of poems, short stories, and essays written by lesser-known men and women of color.