GIRLS WHO GET IT-TONI MORRISON

One of the Black community’s greatest treasures, Toni Morrison has been instrumental in bringing the African-American story to mainstream readers. Known for her vivid description of the Black experience, Toni’s most popular novels include Song of Solomon, Beloved, and The Bluest Eye, an Oprah’s Book Club pick which she wrote as a professor at Howard University while raising two children.

Born Chloe Anthony Wofford, Toni was an avid reader growing up. An admirer of Jane Austen and Leo Tolstoy, her writing career began at Howard when she joined an informal group of writers and poets who gathered regularly to discuss their work. Since those casual meetings, Toni has grown to become a literary icon, winning a Pulitzer for Beloved in 1998, a novel which was adapted for the big screen and named “the best American novel published in the last 25 years” by The New York Times Book Review, as well as a Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993. Reaching out to readers of all ages, she has also co-written children’s books with her son.

A longtime supporter of the arts, Toni created the Princeton Atelier while working in the Ivy League University’s Creative Writing Program, an initiative connecting students with world-famous artists for the creation and celebration of new art. During her time at Princeton, Toni fostered creative studies of all kinds, using her experience to support the development of up-and-coming talent and new forms of expression.

Recently celebrating her 80^th birthday, Toni is still gifting the world with the written word. Her most recent novel, A Mercy, was an LA Times bestseller described as “a work of poetry and intelligence…exposing the infamies of slavery and the hardships of being African American.”

For continually demonstrating the true power of storytelling, Toni Morrison is a Girl Who Gets It.