Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison is an acclaimed teacher, author, and speaker; she grew up in Lorain, Ohio and earned her Bachelor’s in English from Howard University in 1953 and Master of Arts in English in 1955. Over the span of her lifetime, Morrison taught at Texas Southern University, Howard University, and Princeton University as well as worked in publishing, and she wrote and published various children’s books, plays, essays, and novels. Her novels are most well-known, and for her work, she has earned the National Book Critics Circle Award, the National Book Foundation’s Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, an honorary Doctorate degree from the University of Oxford, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. She was also invited to give the Jefferson Lecture as well as to be a guest curator at the Louvre museum in Paris, and she was the first African-American woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993 for her novel Beloved. 

Morrison’s work and influence as a rhetor are plentiful, and especially noteworthy is her complex discussion of race in America. She is known for pointing out that she simply wrote the stories that she wanted to read, and these stories do not shy away from honestly presenting the horrors and deep effects of racism and slavery in America. Morrison gave numerous speeches, lectures, and TV interviews on these subjects as well, and she notes that for her, writing is control. It is a way of thinking about the constant impacts of racism from the past, present, and future. Furthermore, her advocacy for the power of writing and language in general, which is the focus of her Pulitzer Prize acceptance speech, remains timeless. Morrison’s rhetoric — her passion for the power of language and necessary uncomfortable conversations about race — is found in all of her works. As far as her influence, as a professor at Howard University, Morrison taught civil rights activist Stokely Carmichael, and while she worked in publishing, she actively sought out the fiction works of other Black American authors. 

Morrison's rhetoric remains relevant today in that what concerns her work is still relevant today: racism, systemic oppression, the search for cultural identity, and the Black American experience. Through her work, she has also made space for the voices and perspectives of Black American writers and speakers as well as necessary acknowledgements and conversations in regards to ongoing racial injustice. Toni Morrison was a bright light, and her brilliant mind shows through her numerous works and contributions to a nuanced consideration of race in America which continue to be assigned and discussed in college curriculums today.