Library Information and Colophon

Biographies

Toni Morrison

(1931- )
American

Toni Morrison is an author and academic specializing in African-American literature. Her book, Five Poems, created in collaboration with artist Kara Walker, contains original verse by Morrison: “Eve Remembering,” “The Perfect Ease of Grain,” “Someone Leans Near,” “It Comes Unadorned,” and “I am Not Seaworthy.”

Toni Morrison was born as Chloe Anthony Wofford in 1931 in Lorain Ohio to a working-class family. She earned a BA in English with a minor in Classics from Howard University in 1953 and an MA from Cornell University in 1955.1 Morrison published her first novel in 1970 and soon gained wide acclaim for “her epic power, unerring ear for dialogue, and her poetically-charged and richly-expressive depictions of Black America.”2 Morrison has earned a number of literary distinctions including the Pulitzer Prize in 1988 and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993.

Kara Elizabeth Walker

(1969- )
American

Kara Walker is an artist best known for her installations of room-size scenes of striking, and often disturbing, black paper silhouettes that comment on America’s current and historical racial and gender tensions. In Five Poems she illustrates poems by Toni Morrison using smaller versions of her syntax of silhouettes.

Kara Walker was born in Stockton, California in 1969 and raised in a suburb of Atlanta where her father, artist Larry Walker, worked at Georgia State University. Walker received a BFA in painting and printmaking from the Atlanta College of Art in 1991 and an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1994.3 She currently lives in New York and is a member of the faculty of the MFA program at Columbia University.4

Footnotes

References and Links

Appiah, K.A. and Henry Louis Gates, Eds. Toni Morrison: Critical Perspectives Past and Present. New York: Amistad: Distributed by Penguin USA, 1993. View Reed library catalog record

Conner, Marc C., Ed. The Aesthetics of Toni Morrison: Speaking the Unspeakable. Jackson, Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi, 2000. View Reed library catalog record

Grewal, Gurleen. Circles of Sorrow, Lines of Struggle: The Novels of Toni Morrison. Baton Rouge, Louisiana: Louisiana State University Press, 1998. View Reed library catalog record

“Kara Walker.” Art: 21. Web. 4 December 2008. View website

Katya Rouzina. “Toni Morrison.” Voices from the Gaps: Women Artists and Writers of Color, An International Website. Web. 11 September 2008. View website

McKay, Nellie Y., Ed. Critical Essays on Toni Morrison. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1988. View Reed library catalog record

Peterson, Nancy J., Ed. Toni Morrison: Critical and Theoretical Approaches. Baltimore,: John Hopkins University Press, 1997. View Reed library catalog record

Samuels, Wilfred D. and Clenora Hudson-Weems. Toni Morrison. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1990. View Reed library catalog record

“The Art of Kara Walker.” Walker Art Center. Web. 4 December 2008. View website

“Toni Morrison.” The Nobel Prize Foundation. Web. 4 December 2008. View website

Walker, Kara Elizabeth. Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love. Ed. Philippe Vergne. Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2007. View Reed library catalog record

Walker, Kara Elizabeth. Kara Walker: Narratives of a Negress. Saratoga Springs, NY: France Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College: Williams College Museum of Art; Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003. View Reed library catalog record