Ntozake Shange

This extraordinary union of poetry and monumental artwork captures the movement for civil rights in the United States, and honors its most elegant inspiration, Coretta Scott King.

First published in 1975, Shange's choreopoem has been read and performed because it truly revealed what it meant to be of color and female in the twentieth century. Here is the complete text, with stage directions of the dramatic prose poem that resonates with unusual beauty in its fierce message to the world.

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...

Explores language, music, and dance as interpreted though the author's works, combining memoir and essay to explore her deconstruction of English in her celebrated play "For colored girls" and her views on life as a woman and a black individual.

Ntozake Shange offers this eclectic tribute to black cuisine as a true food of life, one that reflects the tenacious spirit and powerful history of a people. With recipes that include everything from Cousin Eddie's Shark with Breadfruit to Collard Greens to Bring You Money, Shange instructs us in the nuances of a cuisine born on the slave ships of the Middle Passage, spiced by the jazz of Duke Ellington, and shared by all members of the African Diaspora....

Examines the life of Martin Luther King's wife, Coretta, who in her own right, was a civil rights pioneer who experienced the injustices of the segregated South and who continued her husband's mission after his assassination.

Called the "Woodstock of Poetry" by American Film, and "Dazzling" by the Los Angeles Times, Poetry in Motion is an unprecedented anthology of twenty-four leading North American poets who sing, chant, anything but "read" their work. The result is a celebration of poetry's ancient oral tradition. And an energetic demonstration that verse is alive and thriving in the media-blitzed age.