Description: Shange, the award-winning author of "for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf," and her sister Bayeza, the award-winning playwright of "The Ballad of Emmett Till," take readers on an astonishing tour through the watershed events of American history as experienced by one strong and musically gifted family.
Brief description: Ntozake Shange was born in Trenton, New Jersey and educated at Barnard College and the University of Southern California, where she received an MA in American Studies. Her choreopoem for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf brought her Broadway success and international recognition. She is the author of an acclaimed adaptation of Bertolt Brecht's Mother Courage and Her Children and has written three novels: Sassafrass, Cypress and Indigo; Betsey Brown; and Liliane. Her poetry includes nappy edges, A Daughter's Geography, Ridin' the Moon in Texas and From Okra to Greens. Her first collection of plays was published by Methuen Drama in 1978.
Review Quotes:
"Lyrical... Think of it as Roots with a treble clef--a confident, lively account of love, art and what falls between." --Kirkus Reviews
"Vibrant... Some Sing, Some Cry is Shange and Bayeza at their poetic best." --Essence "Solid gold... Ntozake Shange and her sister, Ifa Bayeza, partner to write a lyrical and epic novel." --Ebony "Revered poet, playwright, and novelist Shange teams up with her award-winning playwright sister Bayeza in this encompassing historical saga of African American life. In its riveting dramatization of the promise of emancipation, the brutality of the Reconstruction, the baroque cruelty of the Jim Crow era, all the way to the possibilities of the digital age, this bittersweet tale of seven generations in a family of mixed blood and musical genius weaves together essential historical facts and profound emotional truths. " --Donna Seaman, Booklist (starred) "A sweeping African-American saga animating 200 years of history through the voices of seven generations of the Mayfield family's women, beginning with Elizabeth (Ma Bette), a freed slave, and her granddaughter Eudora. Their fate and that of their progeny follows historical events from the Jim Crow South to the civil rights movement with tragedy and triumph. This is a complex poetic treatise on race, culture, love, and family, the use of regional vernacular, dialect, and pure song, resulting in a provocative fictional history." --Publishers Weekly "If there are shoulders modern African-American women's literature stands upon they belong to Ntozake Shange who revolutionized theater and literature with her iconic work for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf in the 1970's. Any of us writing today are inheritors of her genius. Some Sing, Some Cry will show her to be as potent and irrepressible a force as she was thirty years ago." --Sapphire, author of Push "In this epic saga, the sister-sister author combination of Bayeza and Shange offers a richly detailed and boldly colored account of one family's experience in slavery and its legacies for the generations that followed. Some Sing, Some Cry is both moving and arresting." --Annette Gordon-Reed, author of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family