TONI MORRISON

In 1992, aspiring writer MacKenzie Scott took a finance job to make ends meet. Now, she's a billionaire philanthropist and one of the world's wealthiest women.

There have been more than 200 instances of public school districts in Florida banning books since last July.

Author, playwright and longtime champion of multiculturalism Ishmael Reed is receiving a lifetime achievement award for his contributions to literature.

Accounts of book bannings and attempted book bannings, along with threats against librarians, have soared over the past year.

Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’ “The Love Songs of W.

Author Zadie Smith is this year’s winner of the PEN/Audible Literary Service Award, an honor previously given to Toni Morrison, Stephen Sondheim and Margaret Atwood among others.

Sonia Sanchez FILE - Philadelphia poet laureate Sonia Sanchez gestures as she makes remarks during a news conference Thursday, Dec. 29, 2011, in Philadelphia. The poet, activist and educator is this year's winner of the Edward MacDowell Medal, a lifetime achievement honor started in 1960 and previously given to Robert Frost, Toni Morrison and Stephen Sondheim among others. “I had tears in my eyes as I learned about this award,” Sanchez, said in a statement released Sunday, March 6, 2022, by MacDowell, an artist residency founded in 1907. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke, File) (Matt Rourke)NEW YORK — (AP) — The poet, activist and educator Sonia Sanchez is this year's winner of the Edward MacDowell Medal, a lifetime achievement honor started in 1960 and previously given to Robert Frost, Toni Morrison and Stephen Sondheim among others. “I had tears in my eyes as I learned about this award,” Sanchez, 87, said in a statement released Sunday by MacDowell.

The poet, activist and educator Sonia Sanchez is this year’s winner of the Edward MacDowell Medal, a lifetime achievement honor started in 1960 and previously given to Robert Frost, Toni Morrison and Stephen Sondheim among others.

Then came her local school board meeting in Orange County, Florida and an objection raised to Maia Kobabe’s graphic novel “Gender Queer: A Memoir." The civil liberties union has also filed open records requests in Tennessee and Montana over book bans, and a warning letter in Mississippi against what it described as the "unconstitutionality of public library book bans." Red, Wine & Blue also launched a website that tracks book bans, raised about $50,000 to organize against bans and is organizing an event in March featuring authors of banned books and parents from communities where books are being challenged. “We had everyone from middle school students to grandmothers and grandfathers stating their reasons why this should remain on the shelves. The board ended up voting in our favor and the book is still there.”___Hollingsworth reported from Mission, Kansas.

The wave of book bannings around the country has reached a level not seen for decades.

The late Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison has authored some of the most iconic novels. Her short story "Recitatif," which was published in the 1980s, is being republished as a book.

The late Nobel Laureate and novelist was known for her examination of the Black experience. "Recitatif" is about two girls, one Black and one white, but doesn't reveal which is which.

Just days after the banning of “Maus” by a Tennessee school district made national news, two editions of Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize winning graphic story about the Holocaust have reached the top 20 on Amazon.

Colson Whitehead’s “Harlem Shuffle,” Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’ “The Love Songs of W.

Highly anticipated novels from authors who waited decades to return: Your weekly guide to the best in books

"Recitatif," written by Morrison in the early 1980s, follows the lives of two women from childhood to their contrasting fortunes as adults.

Morrison also completed plays, poems, essays, and short stories, one of which is coming out as a book on Feb. 1. “Recitatif,” written by Morrison in the early 1980s and rarely seen over the following decades, follows the lives of two women from childhood to their contrasting fortunes as adults. “A black girl and a white girl meeting in a Howard Johnson’s on the road and having nothing to say. Throughout the story, Morrison will refer to everything from hair length to social status as if to challenge the reader's own racial assumptions. “Like most readers of ‘Recitatif,’ I found it impossible not to hunger to know who the other was, Twyla or Roberta,” Smith acknowledges.

To much of the world the late Toni Morrison was a novelist, celebrated for such classics as “Beloved” and “The Bluest Eye.”.

A recent Wyoming school board meeting was yet again packed with opponents of mask mandates when things took an abrupt turn and a parent started reading out sexually explicit passages from a book available in school libraries.

In 2021, few in the publishing industry worried that no one cared about books anymore.

Parents have the right to petition school boards to remove books — but censorship is also a First Amendment issue.

Republicans plan to forcefully oppose race and diversity curricula in public schools as a core piece of their strategy in the 2022 midterm elections.

Republicans have struggled to deal with Donald Trump since the day he announced his candidacy for president.

Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy of New Jersey narrowly won reelection in his reliably blue state while a Republican political newcomer delivered a stunning upset in the Virginia governor’s race.

Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy of New Jersey narrowly won reelection in his reliably blue state while a Republican political newcomer delivered a stunning upset in the Virginia governor’s race, sending a warning to Democrats that their grip on power in Washington may be in peril.

Democrats in Virginia are scrambling to stave off disaster in the state’s closely watched governor’s race.

Former Vice President Mike Pence has hailed activist parents in suburban Washington who are decrying school curriculums as un-American.

Democrat Terry McAuliffe walked into the Virginia governor’s race late last year as the overwhelming frontrunner in a state former President Donald Trump had just lost by 10 points.

President Joe Biden is framing the Virginia governor’s race as a repudiation of his predecessor, tying the Republican candidate to former President Donald Trump.

An ad being run by GOP candidate Glenn Youngkin features a parent upset that the book was being taught to her son, a high school senior.

Laura Murphy, featured in an ad for candidate Glenn Youngkin, fought to require schools to notify parents about books containing sexual content.

Democrat Terry McAuliffe and Republican Glenn Youngkin got off to a combative start in the second and final debate in Virginia’s closely watched gubernatorial election.

In the author’s work, colonization and racial hatred turn mother against child, Black against white, man against woman.

Philanthropist MacKenzie Scott has funded organizations that received the most money for racial equity in 27 different states following the police killing of George Floyd.

The National Book Foundation announced Friday that Karen Tei Yamashita has been awarded its medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, a $10,000 honor previously given to Toni Morrison, Robert Caro and Isabel Allende among others.

With the surprise twin hiring of two of the country’s most prominent writers on race, Howard University in Washington, D.

Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka will be attending this fall’s PEN America literary gala.

This year's winners of the Anisfield-Wolf awards include novelist James McBride, former U.S. poet laureate Natasha Trethewey and science fiction great Samuel R.

(AP Photo)NEW YORK – One of the country's oldest cultural instititutions, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, is undergoing some of its biggest changes in more than a century. AdHarjo, the first Native American to be appointed U.S. poet laureate, said she looked forward to having an influence on future academy choices. “There are so many incredible Native visual artists,” she told the AP, while also citing such authors as N. Scott Momaday and Leslie Marmon Silko. But the academy will still call itself an academy, while working to make itself more accessible to artists and to the general public. Besides choosing members, the academy also gives dozens of prizes and grants each year, totalling more than $1 million.

The National Women's Hall of Fame was founded in 1969 in Seneca Falls, the site of the first women’s rights convention. She won 18 Grammy awards and, in 1987, became the first woman inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. She was 75 years old when she became the first Black woman to set foot on the North Pole, and stood on the South Pole five years later. Born during the Civil War, Terrell was a dedicated suffragist whose civil rights activism continued up until her death in 1954 at the age of 90. Terrell was the first Black woman in the United States appointed to the school board of a major city, the District of Columbia.

NEW YORK – With Election Day approaching and the pandemic ongoing, Oprah Winfrey is setting aside her usual book club recommendations and instead citing seven personal favorites, ranging from James Baldwin's landmark essays in “The Fire Next Time” to Mary Oliver's poetry collection “Devotions.”Winfrey is calling her choices “The Books That Help Me Through," works she values for “their ability to comfort, inspire, and enlighten.”"It’s a mix of fiction, poetry, non-fiction and spirituality, books I know and trust and revisit time and again,” she said in a statement Monday. Winfrey had planned a new choice every two months; her previous selection, Isabel Wilkerson's “Caste,” was announced in early August. Winfrey spokesperson Chelsea Hettrick said the seven books announced Monday would serve as “a bridge between selections,” and that no firm timeline had been set for future choices. “This year has brought such unprecedented change overall. We will re-evaluate in the coming weeks the selection plan and timing for the remainder of 2020,” she said.

FILE - In this Oct. 10, 2016 file photo, author and filmmaker Sherman Alexie appears at a celebration of Indigenous Peoples' Day at Seattle's City Hall. Alexie is included in a list of authors who wrote books that were among the 100 most subjected to censorship efforts over the past decade, as compiled by the American Library Association. All wrote books that were among the 100 most subjected to censorship efforts over the past decade, as compiled by the American Library Association. The association does not formally count the number of times books are actually removed from a library shelf or from a school reading list. “There are actually two lines of objections to the Anne Frank diary,” Caldwell-Stone says.

NEW YORK Walter Mosley is receiving an honorary National Book Award, cited for dozens of books which range from science fiction and erotica to the acclaimed mystery series that has followed the life of Los Angeles private detective Ezekiel Easy Rawlins. The National Book Awards are presented by the non-profit National Book Foundation. But like such previous medal winners as Ray Bradbury and Elmore Leonard, he has never been nominated for a National Book Award in a competitive category. Mosley knows well the reason: Crime fiction is usually bypassed when lists for a years best books are considered. In a statement Thursday, National Book Foundation Executive Director Lisa Lucas noted the quantity, and quality, of Mosley's work.

NEW YORK A new literary award with a $50,000 cash prize will honor those best at telling a New York story. Wolfson and Tusk are funding the prize themselves and have committed to at least 10 years. Starting next spring, the award will be presented to a book, fiction or nonfiction, published in a given calendar year that is about New York City or takes place there. Celebrated works of the past that would have fit that category include Robert Caro's The Power Broker, Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities and Toni Morrison's Jazz.Jurors for the Gotham prize include filmmaker Ric Burns, poet Safina Sinclair and former New York City schools chancellor Dennis Walcott. The deadline for submissions for the 2020 prize is Nov. 1.

NEW YORK Colson Whitehead keeps winning awards. Already this year's recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and the Orwell Prize for political fiction, Whitehead is now being honored by the Library of Congress. On Monday, it announced that he had won the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction. Whitehead, 50, is the youngest winner of the lifetime achievement prize, which the library has previously given to Toni Morrison, Philip Roth and Denis Johnson, among others. He is the first author to win Pulitzers for consecutive works of fiction The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys, for which he won in April.

FILE - In this May 22, 2018, file photo, Rosanne Cash attends the 2018 PEN Literary Gala in New York. The singer-songwriter is this year's winner of the Edward MacDowell Medal, presented by the MacDowell artist colony, which announced the prize Sunday, May 17, 2020. The singer-songwriter is this year's winner of the Edward MacDowell Medal, presented by the MacDowell artist colony, which announced the prize Sunday. In a statement issued through MacDowell, Cash said she was profoundly humbled to receive an award that Morrison and others had been given. Cash will be formally honored at the MacDowell colony, based in Peterborough, New Hampshire.

Across the United States, volunteers are reporting a jump in little free libraries as readers look to pass the time. Since 2009, tens of thousands of little free libraries have sprung up in the U.S. and more than 100 countries. In rural areas, where broadband internet is sparse, the little free libraries may be only place to find a Toni Morrison novel. We have definitely seen an increase in use, said John Sweet, who helps oversee a free library in Bend, Oregon. Janelle Will of Akron, Michigan, said her tiny farm village of 300 people doesnt have a public library, but its free library remains busy.

Nora Neale HurstonEatonville, FLConsidered one of the pre-eminent writers of twentieth-century African-American literature, Hurston was closely associated with the Harlem Renaissance and has influenced such writers as Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, Gayle Jones, Alice Walker, and Toni Cade Bambara.

TOP STORIESIn El Paso, a Pastors Faith EnduresPastor Michael Grady had never prayed so fervently as when he got the call Saturday telling him that his 33-year-old daughter, Michelle, was lying in a pool of blood. When he saw his daughter, it was bad: I know she wasnt OK, but I told her she was going to be OK. This is one story of faith in the aftermath of the deadly El Paso shooting. Returning to CourtCan California force President Trump to release his tax returns before he can get on the primary ballot? -- Trump is heading to Dayton, Ohio, and El Paso today in the shootings aftermath. -- The Oakland Raiders, the closest thing the NFL has to an institutional antihero, are being featured in the latest season of the HBO show Hard Knocks.OPINION-- As the El Paso massacre showed once again, white supremacy is the poison in our well.

For a day she could pretend to be Sula Peace, from Nobel laureate Toni Morrison 's novel "Sula," an ode to female friendship and how it can endure the most shameless betrayals. Toni Morrison died this week at age 88 and left behind countless writers for whom her characters were like close acquaintances and her stories like parables to guide them through their own lives. Edwidge Danticat, the prize-winning Haitian-American author, called her "a literary mother to generations of writers, especially black women writers like myself." To ask a writer about reading Morrison or how Morrison influenced their work is, in part, to ask why they became writers at all. Saeed Jones, a prize-winning poet whose memoir "How We Fight for Our Lives" comes out this fall, remembered repeated efforts to read "The Bluest Eye" and the Morrison novel "Tar Baby."

(Reuters) - U.S. author Toni Morrison, whose 1987 novel Beloved about a runaway slave won a Pulitzer Prize and contributed to a body of work that made her the first black woman to be presented the Nobel Prize in Literature, has died at the age of 88, her publisher said on Tuesday. FILE PHOTO: Author Toni Morrison smiles as she arrives at Rolex's Mentor and Protege gala, November 10, 2003 in New York. Morrison was born on Feb. 18, 1931, in Lorain, Ohio, and grew up in a family with a storytelling tradition. Morrison, whose only marriage ended in divorce, taught in colleges and was an editor at the publisher Random House before writing her own books. In 2012 Morrison was given the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Barack Obama, who called her a national treasure.

Nobel and Pulitzer Prize winning author Toni Morrison (R) shares a laugh with Oprah Winfrey during the annual Carl Sandburg Literary Awards Dinner in 2010, in Chicago. (CNN) - Oprah Winfrey has written a tribute to "Beloved" author Toni Morrison, who has died at 88-years-old. Toni Morrison took the word and turned it into a Song...of Solomon, of Sula, Beloved, Mercy, Paradise Love, and more," Winfrey wrote. Over the years, Morrison appeared on "The Oprah Winfrey Show" multiple times. "It is exhilarating and life-enhancing every time I read and share her work," Winfrey concluded her tribute.

Nobel laureate and author Toni Morrison died Monday night at the age of 88, according to her publisher Knopf. Morrison wrote such admired books like "Beloved," "Song of Solomon," "Sula" and many others, and was the first African American woman to win a Nobel Prize. Ever since the news came out of Morrison's death, many fans have been sharing some of their favorite words that Morrison wrote or said on social media and they're all incredible. From her books to speeches she made accepting prestigious awards, here are a few Morrison quotes to celebrate the life of the famed author:1. Song of Solomon, 1977.

Angela Radulescu via Wikimedia Commons(CNN) - Toni Morrison, author of seminal works of literature on the black experience such as "Beloved," "Song of Solomon" and "Sula" and the first African-American woman to win a Nobel Prize, has died, her publisher Knopf confirmed to CNN. She was 88. Developing storyThe-CNN-Wire & 2019 Cable News Network, Inc., a Time Warner Company. All rights reserved.

Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison has died. Morrison, who wrote "Beloved" and "Song of Solomon," passed away at Montefiore Medical Center in New York on Monday, publisher Alfred A. Knopf confirmed to The Associated Press on Tuesday. Morrison was hailed as a "visionary force" when she won the Nobel literature prize in 1993, becoming the first black woman to do so. "She made me understand 'writer' was a fine profession," Shonda Rhimes tweeted Tuesday. Toni Morrison, seminal author who stirringly chronicled the Black American experience, dies https://t.co/S6qxix5OCj shonda rhimes (@shondarhimes) August 6, 2019This is a breaking news story.

Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, the author of acclaimed novels such as "Beloved" and "Song of Solomon," has died, Knopf Publishing confirmed Tuesday. She was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993, the first African American to receive the distinction. From 2004: Toni Morrison on a writer's lifeMorrison was born Feb. 18, 1931 in Loraine, Ohio. The Morrison family issued this statement:It is with profound sadness we share that, following a short illness, our adored mother and grandmother, Toni Morrison, passed away peacefully last night surrounded by family and friends. Morrison said at her Nobel Prize address in 1993: "We die.

Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, the author of acclaimed novels such as "Beloved" and "Song of Solomon," has died, Knopf Publishing confirmed Tuesday. She was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993, the first African American to receive the distinction. From 2004: Toni Morrison on a writer's lifeMorrison was born Feb. 18, 1931 in Loraine, Ohio. The Morrison family issued this statement:It is with profound sadness we share that, following a short illness, our adored mother and grandmother, Toni Morrison, passed away peacefully last night surrounded by family and friends. Morrison said at her Nobel Prize address in 1993: "We die.