In 1975, Shange moved back to New York City, after earning her master's degree in American Studies in 1973 from the
University of Southern California in Los Angeles, California. She is acknowledged as having been a founding poet of the
Nuyorican Poets Café. In that year her first and most well-known play was produced —
for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf. First produced
Off-Broadway, the play soon moved on to Broadway at the
Booth Theatre and won several awards, including the
Obie Award,
Outer Critics Circle Award, and the
AUDELCO Award. This play, her most famous work, was a 20-part
choreopoem — a term Shange coined to describe her groundbreaking dramatic form, combining of poetry, dance, music, and song — that chronicled the lives of women of color in the United States. The poem was eventually made into the stage play, was then published in book form in 1977. In 2010, the choreopoem was adapted into a film (
For Colored Girls, directed by
Tyler Perry). Shange subsequently wrote other successful plays, including
Spell No. 7, a 1979 choreopoem that explores the Black experience, and an adaptation of
Bertolt Brecht's
Mother Courage and Her Children (1980), which won an Obie Award. In 1978, Shange became an associate of the
Women's Institute for Freedom of the Press (WIFP). WIFP is an American nonprofit publishing organization. The organization works to increase communication between women and connect the public with forms of women-based media. In the 1980s, Shange moved to Texas to be closer to family and took a job teaching at
Rice University. She then taught in the Creative Writing Program at the
University of Houston from 1984 to 1986. While there, she wrote the
ekphrastic poetry collection ''Ridin' the Moon in Texas: Word Paintings'' and served as thesis advisor for poet and playwright
Annie Finch. Over the course of her career, she also taught or lectured at
Prairie View A&M University (1997-2001), Shange edited
The Beacon Best of 1999: creative writing by women and men of all colors (Beacon Press, ), which featured the work of
Dorothy Allison,
Junot Díaz,
Rita Dove,
Louise Erdrich,
Martín Espada,
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala,
Ha Jin,
Jamaica Kincaid,
Barbara Kingsolver,
Yusef Komunyakaa,
Hanif Kureishi, Marjorie Sandor,
John Edgar Wideman, and others. In 2003, Shange wrote and oversaw the production of ''Lavender Lizards and Lilac Landmines: Layla's Dream'' while serving as a visiting artist at the
University of Florida, Gainesville. Shange's individual poems, essays, and short stories have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, including
The Black Scholar,
Yardbird,
Ms.,
Essence Magazine,
The Chicago Tribune,
VIBE, and
Third-World Women, and
Daughters of Africa (edited by
Margaret Busby, 1992.
Relationship to the Black Arts Movement Although Shange is described as a "post-Black artist", her work was decidedly feminist, whereas the
Black Arts Movement has been criticized as misogynistic and "sexism had been widely and hotly debated within movement publications and organizations."
Amiri Baraka—one of the leading male figures of the movement—denied her as a post-Black artist. With regard to Shange as a part of the black aesthetic and as a post-Black artist, he claimed "that several women writers, among them
Michelle Wallace [sic] and Ntozake Shange, like Ishmael Reed|[Ishmael] Reed, had their own 'Hollywood' aesthetic, one of 'capitulation' and 'garbage.
Honors Among Shange's honors and awards were fellowships from the
Guggenheim Foundation and
Lila Wallace Reader's Digest Fund, a
Shelley Memorial Award from the
Poetry Society of America, and a
Pushcart Prize. In April 2016,
Barnard College announced that it had acquired Shange's archive. == Personal life and death ==