I read over Ntozake Shange's biography today. She did so much work. I feel good when Black women are able to do their work before they leave here.
— Kimberly Nicole Foster (@KimberlyNFoster) October 28, 2018
BooksSolution Sessions
solution sessions: ntozake shange’s final blessing
Photo by Terrence Jennings for AFROPUNK
In a time when it seems like we’re losing more and more of our creative leaders, it’s important we give them their roses while they’re still here to enjoy them.
Black women all up and down my TL placing roses at Ntozake Shange’s feet today. She meant so much to all of us. She loved us so and wrote to us in love.
— Dara Tafakari (@TrulyTafakari) October 28, 2018
The AFROPUNK family was blessed to host the iconic playwright and poet Ntozake Shange at our Brooklyn Solution Sessions celebrating re(Sisters) and the power of Black women this summer in what would become one of her last public readings.
Charming, powerful, and energetic as ever at 69 (she passed just ten days after her 70th birthday), Shange spoke of blue Blackness, the resilience of Black beauty and Black joy. The power and strength of words reverberated through the performance hall as she took as to cotton fields and the streets of Chicago. “Won’t somebody/ anybody sing a Black girl’s song?” Shange pleaded in her seminal 1976 theater piece “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf.” On our Brooklyn stage, an audience of Black women gave Shange a much-deserved standing ovation. She sang our song and we are forever changed and grateful.
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