Toni Morrison was born in Lorain, Ohio, as Chloe Ardelia Wofford on February 18, 1931. She was nothing short of amazing and the world suffered a great loss when she passed away on August 5, 2019. Some highlights from her incredible life include getting a master’s degree in American Literature in 1957, becoming the first black female editor in fiction at Random House in New York City in the late 1960s, published her first novel The Bluest Eye in 1970, won the Pulitzer Prize for Beloved in 1987, founded The Toni Morrison Society in 1993 and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature five months later.

How can you not be inspired by all that and not want to learn more about her?

Her official and more comprehensive biography can be found on The Toni Morrison Society website and you can learn about her phenomenal legacy that lives on in the society. They have a series of events happening to celebrate her birthday listed right on the home page and a link to a one hour BBC documentary that you really should check out. I think she was a phenomenal woman and feel that her society website is the best resource to learn more about her and her work more comprehensively than I can share in a short blog post.

If you are familiar with Toni and her work, I guarantee you will find information on her society website that you don’t know and discover resources and events that you can access throughout the year.

If you have never heard of Toni Morrison, I hope that this birthday introduction will pique your curiosity about her and that you will read some of her books – your life will be better for it.

– Stacey