Ntozake Shange
Poet, performance artist, playwright, and novelist Ntozake Shange was born Paulette Williams on October 18, 1948, in Trenton, New Jersey. She earned a BA in American studies from Barnard College in 1970 and then left New York to pursue graduate studies at the University of Southern California (USC) in Los Angeles. It was during this time that she took the name “Ntozake” (“she who comes into her own things”) “Shange” (“she who walks like a lion”) from the Zulu dialect Xhosa. She received an MA in American studies from USC in 1973. She passed October 27, 2018.
