Author Ntozake Shange of 'For Coloured Girls' fame has died

Playwright, poet and author Ntozake Shange, whose most acclaimed theatre piece is the 1975 Tony Award-nominated play "For Coloured Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuf," died Saturday, according to her daughter. She was 70.

Shange's "For Coloured Girls" describes the racism, sexism, violence and rape experienced by seven black women. It has been influential to generations of progressive thinkers, from #MeToo architect Tarana Burke to Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Lynn Nottage. After learning of Shange's death, Nottage called her "our warrior poet/dramatist."
One of her characters shouts, "I will raise my voice / & scream & holler / & break things & race the engine / & tell all yr secrets bout yrself to yr face."
She would also assume a new Zulu name: Ntozake means "She who comes with her own things" and Shange means "She who walks like a lion."
"For Coloured Girls" opened at the Public Theatre in downtown Manhattan in June 1976, with Shange, then 27, performing as one of the women. The New York Times reviewer called it "extraordinary and wonderful" and "a very humbling but inspiring thing for a white man to experience."