Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison was a prolific, award-winning novelist whose stories centered the Black, specifically African-American, experience for a Black audience purposefully subverting the white gaze.

Her prose is known for being lyrical and layered, though she has rejected critics' emphasis on her poetic style and prefers the stories themselves to stand in their power.

Her work often engages with themes of violence, womanhood, racism and colorism, and the long-term and unevaluated consequences of American chattel slavery and how that shapes African-American life in the centuries that followed.

Her novels include "The Bluest Eye," "Song of Solomon," "Sula," "Beloved," and many more. In total, she wrote 11 novels, five children’s books, two plays, a song cycle and an opera.

She became the first African-American woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993 for her novels "characterized by visionary force and poetic import, [which] gives life to an essential aspect of American reality."