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Raised by an artistic family who hosted great African-American guests that included Dizzy Gillespie and Chuck Berry, Shange turned racist attacks, depression, and suicide attempts into poetry and other writings. Her most notable work was her 1976 choreopoem - a poetic play set to music and dance - For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow is Enuf, which highlights the sufferings women of color endure as experienced by seven characters named for colors of the rainbow, and eventually played on Broadway, only the second play by an African-American woman to do so. Shange went on to write dozens more works, including novels and children's books, that explored feminist themes, injustice, oppression, and violence, and influenced the next generation of progressive African-American women writers and artists. Born Paulette Linda Williams, she changed her name in 1971 to two Zulu words: Ntozake means "She who comes with her own things", and Shange means "Who walks like a lion".
Walker was the youngest of eight children, raised by poor Georgia sharecropping farmers. After her eye was disfigured in an accident and she was embarrassed over the way she looked, she found comfort in reading and writing poetry. She would go on to become class valedictorian of her high school and to publish her first short story the same year she graduated from college. She burst into national prominence with the 1982 publication of her third novel, The Color Purple, about the trials and endurance of an early 20th century woman who is abused by her father and then her husband. The following year The Color Purple won both the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award for fiction, and in 1985 it was made into a movie. Walker has also been involved with civil rights for most of her life - her first poetry collection, Once (1968), and many works since then are based on her experiences in the Civil Rights Movement. Walker was at the top of the wave in the surge of African-American women's literature that began in the 1970s, and along with racism and civil rights, her writing has covered a vast range of topics that include Africa, ethnicity, black political leaders, abortion - including her own - rape, violence, feminism, spirituality, love, and friendship. In writing and in public she champions racial and gender equality.
