Word: morrison
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...writers and artists, musicians, dancers and actors find themselves in an era of creativity unrivaled in American history. The current efflorescence may have begun with the literature and criticism by black women published in the early '80s, especially the works of Ntozake Shange, Michele Wallace, Alice Walker and Toni Morrison. These women, and those who came later, were able to reach both the traditional large readership, which is middle class, white and female, and a new black female audience that had been largely untapped and unaddressed...
Assigning a single starting date for an upsurge in creativity is an exercise in arbitrariness: the year 1987 will do as well as any. That was when August Wilson's Fences premiered on Broadway and Toni Morrison published her masterpiece, Beloved. Both would receive Pulitzer Prizes. In that same year, PBS aired Henry Hampton's Eyes on the Prize, the six-part documentary on the civil rights era, and Cornell scholar Martin Bernal published Black Athena, a highly controversial account of African sources of classical Greek civilization. Meanwhile, Spike Lee and Wynton Marsalis were establishing themselves as masters of film...
Consider the achievements since 1993 alone, when Bill Clinton invited Maya Angelou to be the first poet since Robert Frost to read an original work at a presidential Inauguration. George C. Wolfe won a Tony Award for his direction of Angels in America. Novelist Toni Morrison became the first black woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Rita Dove was appointed the country's first black poet laureate. Two works inspired by the Rodney King affair -- 56 Blows, a symphony by Alvin Singleton, and Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, a one- woman docudrama by playwright and performer Anna Deavere Smith...
Young or old, today's African-American artists increasingly strike themes that are racially and culturally universal. Some emphasize age, gender or sexual orientation over ethnicity. Others, like Morrison and novelist Charles Johnson, whose Middle Passage won the National Book Award for fiction in 1990, explore the black experience in America. Still others, such as Wolfe, choreographer David Rousseve and writer Darius James (Negrophobia: An Urban Parable), dissect racial stereotypes, while those like choreographer Ralph Lemon and sculptor Martin Puryear reflect no identifiable racial content at all. Rita Dove summarizes the trend best when she says: "There are times when...
Last October, time senior correspondent Jack White noted that in the same week, one African-American author, Toni Morrison, won the Nobel Prize for Literature while another, Poet Laureate Rita Dove, read her work at the White House. Not long thereafter, another black poet, Yusef Komunyakaa, won the Pulitzer Prize. White began to wonder whether these events and the increasing prominence of other African-American authors signaled a black literary efflorescence...