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Toni Morrison – Novelist

Chloe Wofford was born in Ohio on February 18, 1931. Her parents called her Toni after Saint Anthony, a Patron of lost and stolen articles, who is often portrayed with a book, lily, or baby Jesus in his arms. Her married name was Morrison, and she kept both names for eternity.
Toni Morrison studied English at Howard University (BA) and Cornel (MA), where she questioned white patriarchal pedagogy. In 1965, she moved to New York to work as a senior editor at a textbook publisher and later for Random House. There, Morrison created a Black literary arm where she curated the stories of rising Black stars, including Dr. Angela Davis and Muhammed Ali. In this role, she also authored the must-have-coffee-table-reference-gem, The Black Book.

Growing confidence in her identity as a writer, Morrison occupied the expansive space outside the white male gaze. She clarified: “When you take that out, the whole world opens up.” Morrison embraced the assignment and produced heavy-hitting books: The Bluest Eye, Sula, and The Song of Solomon—the first book by a Black author to be named Book of the Month since Wright’s Native Son in 1941 and her sole novel with a male protagonist.

Morrison continued to explore Black girls and womanhood in Tar Baby and the most horrible and fierce love of Black mothers in Beloved, winning the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. While teaching at Princeton, she was honored with the 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature, the first Black woman to win the award. And in 2012, President Barack Obama presented Morrison with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Every single accolade poured over Morrison and unexhausted here was hard-earned and well-deserved. We love her without ever having known her. She takes a memory, an emotion, or a thought and transforms it into something we feel. One of the dopest virtuosos, Toni Morrison, is our Matron Saint, our Auntie whose words revisit voyages in the beautiful, complex detail of our collective Black lives. She became an ancestor on August 5, 2019–long after returning many stolen and lost things, guarding & protecting them on the page.
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Toni Morrison – Novelist

Chloe Wofford was born in Ohio on February 18, 1931. Her parents called her Toni after Saint Anthony, a Patron of lost and stolen articles, who is often portrayed with a book, lily, or baby Jesus in his arms. Her married name was Morrison, and she kept both names for eternity.
Toni Morrison studied English at Howard University (BA) and Cornel (MA), where she questioned white patriarchal pedagogy. In 1965, she moved to New York to work as a senior editor at a textbook publisher and later for Random House. There, Morrison created a Black literary arm where she curated the stories of rising Black stars, including Dr. Angela Davis and Muhammed Ali. In this role, she also authored the must-have-coffee-table-reference-gem, The Black Book.

Growing confidence in her identity as a writer, Morrison occupied the expansive space outside the white male gaze. She clarified: “When you take that out, the whole world opens up.” Morrison embraced the assignment and produced heavy-hitting books: The Bluest Eye, Sula, and The Song of Solomon—the first book by a Black author to be named Book of the Month since Wright’s Native Son in 1941 and her sole novel with a male protagonist.

Morrison continued to explore Black girls and womanhood in Tar Baby and the most horrible and fierce love of Black mothers in Beloved, winning the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. While teaching at Princeton, she was honored with the 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature, the first Black woman to win the award. And in 2012, President Barack Obama presented Morrison with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Every single accolade poured over Morrison and unexhausted here was hard-earned and well-deserved. We love her without ever having known her. She takes a memory, an emotion, or a thought and transforms it into something we feel. One of the dopest virtuosos, Toni Morrison, is our Matron Saint, our Auntie whose words revisit voyages in the beautiful, complex detail of our collective Black lives. She became an ancestor on August 5, 2019–long after returning many stolen and lost things, guarding & protecting them on the page.

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