Toni Morrison

Right out of the gate, with her early novels The Bluest Eye and Sula, it was clear that Toni Morrison was a writer to be reckoned with, capable of powerfully articulating the rage and despair of black women trying to get by in a society permeated with both racism and sexism. Her big-league status was cemented with the Pulitzer she won for her fifth book, 1988’s Beloved, a horrifying ghost story about a former slave haunted by the daughter she murdered. (Ten years later, it was made into a movie by Oprah Winfrey, which in some quarters beats a Pulitzer any day of the week.) In 1993, she became the first black woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, and in her acceptance speech talked movingly about her mission to document “what moves at the margin. …What it is to live at the edge of towns that cannot bear your company.” Now 72 and a humanities professor at Princeton, she visits St. Kate’s as part of the Women With Substance lecture series. O’Shaughnessy, 2004 Randolph Ave., St Paul, (651) 690-6700, www.stkate.edu/oshaughnessy