Playwright, poet and novelist, Ntozake Shange was born Paulette Williams in Trenton, New Jersey, in 1948. Shange is best known for her performance pieces "choreopoem" that blend poetry, music, and dance. This form is exemplified by her best-known work, "For colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf" (1976). In these and her novels and poetry, she examines what she calls the metaphysical dilemma of being alive, female, and black. In 1966 she enrolled at Barnard College and graduated in 1970. It was while in graduate school at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she earned a master's degree in 1973, that she took an African name, Ntozake ("she who comes with her own things") Shange ("who walks like a lion").
Between 1972 and 1975, Shange taught writing and took part in dance performances and poetry readings. She then moved to New York, where her "choreopoem," mentioned above, opened on Broadway in 1976, and ran for two years. The play won an Obie Award as well as Emmy, Tony, and Grammy Awards nominations. Shange continued to produce plays and choreopoems, in addition to teaching drama and creative writing at several universities, including Yale and Howard. In 1981 the dramatic trilogy "Three pieces" (which includes "Boogie Woogie landscapes") was published, winning the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for poetry. That same year Shange received an Obie for her adaptation of Bertold Brecht's "Mother Courage and her children." Shange has also published several collections of poetry, including Nappy Edges (1978), "Fifty poems celebrating the voices of defiantly self-sufficient women," and "From okra to greens" (1984). Shange published three novels: "Sassafras, Cypress & Indigo" (1982), "Betsy Brown" (1985), and "Liliane: resurrection of the daughter" (1994). Shange's "The love space demands: a continuing saga" (1991) marked a return to the choreopoem form. In 1983, she became associate professor of drama at the University of Houston.