CHANGEMAKER 27: TONI MORRISON

Today's changemaker is Chloe Anthony Wofford Morrison, known as Toni Morrison. Born in Lorain, Ohio, in 1931, Morrison was a celebrated novelist, essayist, book editor and college professor who depicted the Black experience in her publications and became the first Black woman to win a Nobel Prize in Literature. She graduated from Howard University in 1953 with a B.A. in English and later received her MA from Cornell University in 1955.

Morrison became the first Black woman to be made a Senior Editor at Random House in 1967, where she brought Black literature into the spotlight and contributed to promoting it for twenty years. Morrison’s early novels earned her national attention, and, in 1988, she won the Pulitzer Prize for Beloved (1987).

She became the Robert F. Goheen Professor of the Humanities in Princeton University in 1989 and founded the Princeton Atelier and continued inspiring many students and peers until her retirement in 2006. In 2012, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award in the United States.

In 1993, the Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to Toni Morrison, "who in novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import, gives life to an essential aspect of American reality."

In 2020, the National Women’s Hall of Fame inducted her as one of the six prominent Black women and called her the "The Conscience of America."

📸 Nobel Foundation archive

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