“When you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else.”

—Toni Morrison, in an interview for O: The Oprah Magazine

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Toni Morrison is an American author, editor, literary critic, playwright, and professor. She has won numerous honorable literary and humanitarian distinctions throughout her life, such as the Nobel Prize in Literature, the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Morrison’s focus on the black experience in America, as well as her refusal to include the white gaze in her works or to write for a white reading audience, is something she credits to making her works standout amongst other writers.

Morrison’s most notable works of fiction include The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon, Beloved, and her most recently published work God Help the Child. Some of her noteworthy nonfiction titles are Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, Birth of a Nation’hood, and Burn This Book.