by Adult Services Manager Whitney
February 18 is Toni Morrison Day, a statewide holiday in Ohio due to legislation passed late last year. It also would have been her 90th birthday.
Born Chloe Ardelia Wofford, Morrison grew up in Lorain, and later set two of her earliest books, The Bluest Eye and Sula, in Ohio. Morrison was the first African American woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, and won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction for Beloved.
She also worked as an editor: she was the first black woman senior editor in the fiction department at Random House, and helped lift up black writers like Angela Davis, Toni Cade Bambara, and Wole Soyinka.
There are many ways to celebrate Toni Morrison Day! Read or listen to her novels, watch a documentary about her life, and read other authors she promoted, admired, or inspired. Check out her books, as well as these titles, available with your Bexley Public Library card:
- Toni Morrison, The Pieces I Am | DVD / digital
- The Toni Morrison Book Club by Juda Bennett | print / audio ebook
- Who’s Got Game? by Toni Morrison and Slade Morrison | print / digital
- The Source of Self-Regard: selected essays, speeches, and meditations by Toni Morrison | print / digital
- Well Read Black Girl by Glory Edim | print / digital
- Deep Sightings and Rescue Missions: Fiction, Essays, and Conversations by Toni Cade Bambara | digital
- Freedom is a Constant Struggle by Angela Davis | print / digital
- The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010 | print / digital
- Africa39 by Wole Soyinka | print / digital