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People all over Missouri will have the pleasure of reading and discussing Betsey Brown during ReadMOre, Missouri's statewide book club. Written by Ntozake Shange in 1985, the novel is a semi-autobiographical account of an African-American St. Louis family affected by racial tensions, desegregation and marital conflict in the late 1950s. (The author's name is pronounced En-toe-ZAK-kay SHONG-gay.)

Shange was born Paulette Williams in Trenton, New Jersey in 1948.According to a biographical sketch by Mafo Kosseh-Kamada, "In 1956, the Williams family moved to Missouri. Being a gifted child, Shange was sent several miles away from home to school in St. Louis to receive special schooling. For the first time, she attended a non-segregated school. She experienced overt racism and was constantly harassed by the other students.. Seeing reality as such at an early age created a sense of displacement for Shange while becoming the motivational force behind her writing. I started writing because there's an absence of things I was familiar with or that I dreamed about. One of my senses of anger is related to this vacancy - a yearning I had as a teenager...and when I get ready to write, I think I'm trying to fill that... (Interview with Brenda Lyons 1986). Shange's goal became to be a part of a collection of books that someone might give to a female child.

"In 1966, Shange enrolled in Barnard College in New York. [She] became starved for Black literature. In an interview with Henry Blackwell, Shange summarizes her college education: For years, I was able to tolerate being chastised and denigrated in American literature and any other kind of literature because that is where we were, and that's how women were regarded. She graduated with honors in 1970 with a B. A. in American Studies. Deciding that there was no space for an independent woman's voice, Shange moved from New York to California, and attended graduate school at University of Southern California. Here, Shange taught writing and began to associate with poets, teachers, performers, and feminist writers. My craft was seriously nurtured in California and that probably has some influence on what my writing looks like (Interview with Henry Blackwell). It was in graduate school where she became 'Ntozake Shange.' In 1973, she earned her Master's Degree in American Studies.

"Shange continued living in California and taught courses in humanities, women's studies, and writing at various colleges. Not only was she writing poetry, Shange and her friends began to perform their poetry, music, and dance in and around San Francisco. The poetry of the Black writer on the West Coast clarifies - migrations, our relationship to the soil, to ourselves in space. There is an enormous amount of space in the West, and you do not feel personally impinged upon every time you come out your door, like you do in New York and Chicago (Blackwell). In addition to teaching, writing, and performing, Shange joined Halifu Osumare's dance company. Here, she met a woman by the name of Paula Moss. They began collaborating on poetry, music, and dance that would become part of Shange's first choreopoem, For colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf: a choreopoem."

The full biographical sketch is at the University of Minnesota:
http://voices.cla.umn.edu/new site/authors/SHANGEntozake.htm

Another of the many sketches is at Rutgers University:
http://www.scils.rutgers.edu/~cybers/shange2.html

Here is a link to the author's autobiographical poem:
http://myhero.com/myhero/hero.asp?hero=n_shange

--Michael Bouman

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updated 03/30/05