Toni Morrison Reflections

REMEMBERING TONI MORRISON

NCTE members reflect on her role in our classrooms and lives

Last week we learned of the passing of literary icon Toni Morrison. The influence of Morrison’s work transformed the literary canon in many of our classrooms. The voices and stories of characters like Pecola Breedlove, Milkman, Sethe, and Bride have become essential to our imaginations. Morrison believed that “if there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it,” and in her own writing she leaves behind a legacy.

We asked our members for stories about how Morrison shaped their classrooms and experiences as educators. The following pages are filled with their poignant responses.

Professor Toni Morrison was such a monumental giant whose very thoughts and words illuminated and illustrated us to ourselves— including those parts many of us would rather not see. She went there— fearlessly, courageously, and always, always truthfully. Like Shakespeare, a writer whose works she “knew by the back,” as Jim says in Huckleberry Finn, Prof. Morrison used fiction and nonfiction and her speeches to project her universal messages of never-ending inquiry into who we all are: women, men, transgender, child, adult, Black, White, Asian, Native American, Muslim, agnostic, Christian, Southern, Northern —Difference/Other in all of our unique manifestations. Very few writers provide such depth and resonance in their writing and, in addition, provide insight into their work—rationale, perspective, and yes, caveats for what lies ahead should we fail to heed warnings and signposts, signaling danger or repetition of the past chaos. Professor Toni Morrison is without question in this rarified and cherished category.

—Jocelyn A. Chadwick, NCTE Past President

Toni Morrison once said, "When a child walks in the room, your child or anybody else's child, do your eyes light up? That's what they are looking for."

When I first heard this quote, I was a new mother and budding educator. I had always been complimented on my smile and my visible light when I entered the room, but had not really considered if I intentionally "lit up" for the sake of influencing others. I made the choice, thanks to Morrison, to light up.

I teach English as a profession. I am an avid reader and part-time writer; hence, why Morrison was a woman I followed. Yet the most influential move on my life from this novelist with whom I was indelibly impressed, would take root in my mothering and teaching and not in my reading and writing.

Dear Ms. Morrison, I would like to tell you that your words proved fruitful.

From my own sons to my students to relatives and strangers, children notice when you light up and they are indeed in search of it. Thank you for your time here. —Joyice Harris

I do not know who I would be as a teacher, learner, thinker, writer, or woman without Toni Morrison. Her Song of Solomon was the one book I read each year with 11th-grade students. Upon her passing, so many students reached out to share how much it meant to be exposed to her genius that I bawled all day. Some struggled with the depth, but they persevered. I was able to see Ms. Morrison when she spoke at the 2011 National Book Festival, and was so awestruck that I couldn’t speak. My mother made a beeline to the microphone as soon as the Q&A session started so that she could ask about the struggle that students complain about with her work. Her answer was so her: “Tell them that they don’t know anything.” I loved her like she was my mother, because she was. She formed me as a writer, as a reader, as a young black woman from the second I read those beginning lines in The Bluest Eye at my grandmother’s dining room table. “Here is the house.” And it was. It was the house of love for words.

—Jamilla Rice

I read Toni Morrison for the first time on a train heading back to Chicago: I had just graduated college, and the novel was Tar Baby. I went back then to pick up The Bluest Eye and Sula, and when I got to graduate school, I knew immediately I wanted to be a Morrison scholar. Her language moved me to read more and to write. It helped me understand the voluptuous bounty of my own history.

In the early years of my career, I taught The Bluest Eye in courses like "Growing Up in America." I would go on to teach senior seminars focused on her work alone. Always, I wanted students to understand the complexity of the Black experience, to fall in love with her language, and to appreciate that all good writers have something to teach us about each other and about ourselves.

From that first mesmerizing experience on a train to chapters written and books unread, I am an intellectual because Morrison had stories to tell, and I had lessons to learn and to pass on. We did that together. RIP, TM. —Eleanor Branch

I first read Morrison during my second year of teaching when a colleague asked me to go to a conference on Morrison in Lorain, and we each needed to read a novel. At the conference, [Morrison] walked by me; her skirt brushed my shoulder. Her presence was a force that rippled through the room. I sat in this conference humbled by how much I did not know while breathing in the history, the lack of my personal knowledge, and the knowledge from others as we discussed her work with her nearby. Morrison taught me how to be a reader and how to be a writer. She taught me to share her work with my students because her words haunted me in that they woke me up to a world I was unaware of and my place in that world. I teach her novels because to read Morrison is to be changed. She opens a window to a world so many fail to see, and she encourages us to tell stories so the past and its lessons transcend our brief time in this place we call home. —Kristin Perrin

Toni Morrison was an inspiration to me as a woman getting out of an abusive marriage and finding the courage to put herself back in school to fulfill her dream to teach. Her words filled my heart with the courage to know that I could survive and the passion for literacy that encouraged me to become a Literacy Specialist. Last year I was a 2018 NJLA Literacy Educator of the Year, and this year I plan on taking my passion and using it as chairperson for the Literacy Campaign in Ghana. Toni Morrison was an iconic wordsmith who told a story that ripped into one’s core. She showed everyone the power that words have to connect human souls and build empathy and compassion in readers—soft skills needed to be successful in today’s society. The world lost a powerful woman yesterday, but her words, journey, and mission will forever be imprinted in her readers’ hearts. There is no better way to be ultimately preserved. Write those books! Tell your stories!

—Janice Alvarez

I would guess Beloved is the book students most associate with me, and that is an amazing thing. Upon learning of her passing, a former student wrote this to me: "Today made me realize how incredibly grateful I was to have knowingly lived in a world with Toni Morrison." I agree. —Kirsten Nelson

Years ago I taught Beloved in an AP lit class, and one parent asked that her 17-year-old son be excused because the book contained “icky stuff.” I grudgingly gave him an alternative assignment and he was excused to the library for our class discussions. However, shortly thereafter he came to me privately and said he’d heard students talking about the book, and he wanted to read it. Of course I didn’t go against his mother’s wishes, but I did nod to the extra copies of the book on my shelf. His alternative assignment was based on the writings of Martin Luther King Jr., and in his paper he referenced the harsh truths in Morrison’s novel that shadow us still.

Yes, she wrote about the hard and painful truth—the icky stuff—that was and still is, but she did it beautifully. Her body may have died, but she’ll live forever.

—Lea Mathieu

When I first taught Song of Solomon in a Fiction course at Lorain County Community College, I did so because Morrison was a native writer of Lorain, Ohio. When I taught in China or other sites overseas, everyone knew and loved her. We hosted a TM conference at LCCC and had over 1,000 people attend from Britain to Japan. Now people no longer ask, “Who is he?” but know more about “her” and her work. She took the time to speak to area teachers when she was here because she cared about her work and us.

—Marilyn Valentino

Toni compels me to go and to go boldly. I have no need to succumb to quicksand of the present, no need to be mired in dehumanizing implications of the white gaze. A gaze I know too well. As a former student of English literature, HS teacher, and now a literacy researcher and teacher educator, that gaze is ever present. Toni’s writing grants freedom to live beyond. In Toni’s wake there is only my brilliance. Toni’s voice, a resonant bass line, says reach within for my grandmothers’ epistemology. I harness deep ways of knowing that never fail. Hearing Toni share in The Pieces I Am breathed life into me.

Academic writing is lonely and exacting. It demands. Toni reminded me: writing is Freedom. Like Toni I can make something beautiful, powerful. Toni made a life. She listened to those around her and to the voices inside. She took Lorain, OH, editorial life, Black girl pain, and mothering, and she made! I can, too. When our heroes die, a beckoning follows. I hear “What will you do next?” from Toni. I shine.

—Cherise McBride

While way too many comments here will focus on her novels, and maybe rightly so, the most important book by Morrison is Playing in the Dark, one of the first works of criticism that truly examined whiteness, cultural hegemony, and privilege. It went on to influence a generation of literary scholars and future comp/rhet folk, especially fellow scholars of color.

She was a multifaceted writer whose criticism has never really received the attention it deserves. I hope it will now. —Amanda Espinosa-Aguilar

In my seven years of teaching, I've taught Beloved only once.

The teaching of it scares me. Toni Morrison's oeuvre fought so hard to bring a voice to the Black experience, to every African American living here in the shadow of not just the country's history, but their personal and ancestral history. I don't think this alone serves as justice, but I think it's related.

In turn, how then to teach such a book in a way that does it something related to justice? It was one of my first favorite books to read and one of the hardest to teach. I think I owe it to her, and to my students, to try again. —Sara Peck

Whether reading Beloved, Sula, or Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison's soaring imagination and eloquent language have never failed to teach our students what it is to be more human. The loss of her perspective at this perilous moment in our country has left us bereft—as students and teachers, and as human beings. We are dedicated to keep on reading her—to keep her in a hallowed place in our teaching. Her characterization of why Adventures of Huckleberry Finn finally succeeds is true of her own work: Morrison's work "heaves, manifests, and lasts."

—Lynn Cohen

I came to Toni Morrison in the early 1990s when a colleague and I began teaching Song of Solomon. I fell in love. With the language, the sentences, the history, the layers, and the challenges the novel posed for white readers and the stories the novel legitimized for my students of color. Over the years, my students and I together pieced together the layers of her novels, which included at different times Beloved, Sula, and The Bluest Eye. Student response has been pure joy and wonder, sometimes discomfort and resentment—her novels always succeed in bringing a class together, opening up and nurturing new perspectives.

Listening to how students of color respond personally and intellectually to Morrison over the years has only fueled the need for me to continue my own diversity-based education and keep trying to provide ALL students with a foundation of empathy, justice, and real, whole love. —Laura Rochette

I teach a course on disciplinary literacy for MAT and MEd students and for college-level faculty. One thing I am always at pains to do is to help accomplished adults see that there is always more to be learned about reading, and that reading is different across disciplines. To do so, I use excerpts from a textbook on inferential statistics and from Morrison's Beloved. Her text has helped so many of my students come to these fundamental realizations in a matter of minutes, and I have spent many joyful classes picking apart Morrison's syntax and figuring out, with my fellow teachers, what it is students have to know in order to finally meet the demands of Morrison's prose. We do so because we want our students to have the experience of viewing America through the lenses of our greatest writers, and to read Morrison is to have reached a pinnacle. We know that the payoff, when they get there, is great: a richer understanding of our history, our present, and ourselves. —Britnie Kane

The first time I read Song of Solomon, I knew I was reading a masterpiece. I have read it several times since and each time I have found new, moving inspiration. It was with great joy that I shared this work with my students and watched them make their own discoveries and understandings. —Mary Cox

It seems as if there wasn't a time when I didn't know the name Toni Morrison. I remember, as a young mother in my early 30s, going to the community library to check out Jazz. Then, in my first semester of grad school, I completed a project focusing on her Nobel Prize speech. “It’s the language,” she said, “only the language.” This inspired me to continue, and The Bluest Eye was, of course, the way to go. I loved these books. I really loved them.

—Karen Jobe

Toni Morrison created a prolific body of work that transformed my thoughts as a person when I was a child and later allowed me, as a teacher, to share with countless young adults.

Growing up, her most impactful books were The Bluest Eye and Song of Solomon. Both books shared perspectives of African American life that at the time were invisible to mainstream society. Ms. Morrison shared some of my short life experiences with the world. For the first time in my life, I felt heard via her literature. The professor emerita gave me and thousands of others a voice.

As an educator, I made certain to use the Pulitzer and Nobel Prizewinner’s works in my classroom, included them in my classroom library, and recommended them for leisure reading. The Bluest Eye and Song of Solomon were staples, the first for middle school students, and both for middle school and high school students. Tar Baby, Beloved, and Jazz were also high school favorites.

Morrison's work is a legacy for all who read it. —Lisa MacKay

First read her in college. Loved sharing her exacting prose. Her experiences allowed students to write about their own. It made me realize we are more alike in our common humanity than we like to admit. —Blaine Miller

In a "Freaks, Geeks, and Grotesques" course I taught at Fordham University, my students learned to find a visible beauty in darkness when we read and discussed Song of Solomon. This novel and its strange familiarity disturbed and delighted my undergraduates— English majors and nonmajors alike—in that there is a cryptic sound alive in it. There are hushes and whispers emanating throughout the pages. There is a queering of the familiar and a dirtiness of truth that nonetheless made my students want to keep reading. It was as if they were rolling in dirt and willingly rubbing it against their skin. There is no shame in "ugly" thoughts or realities—only a relief of being honest with who you are. Milkman's search for personal and familial answers in Song of Solomon is part of a familiar questing motif, but his dreams of flight are simultaneously freeing and dangerously Icarian. Pilate's mysterious presence—her self-made woman who looms large—has much to keep telling us about grit.

—Cristina Baptista

Toni Morrison is my favorite author; she gave African Americans a voice during the silence. Her work has inspired and given persons a deeper appreciation for their ancestors and their heritage. She was an advocate for many (the known and the unknown). —Clevanche' Lightbourne

I am reminded of my youth when I think of Toni Morrison. I devoured her books in my late teens and early twenties—I pine for those days, to be so enthralled in books, books that related to me as a young woman.

Books that I could not put down. Thankfully, I have been able to share some of her work with my students when I became a teacher. Teaching in Japan, I remember a group of girls reading The Bluest Eye in literature circles. These Japanese girls, fluent in both English and Japanese, and learning French, were simply taken by the book and the young girl, Pecola. Thousands of miles away and 45 years later, these Japanese girls saw themselves in Pecola in many ways. I know these four girls still remember her years later, and they remember Morrison. My favorite is Song of Solomon—I vow to teach it one day, but I must hurry, as I have only nine years left to do so. Morrison's works are engrained in my heart. I am crying as I write this.

—Krisann Dutson

The genius of Toni Morrison is unsurpassed. Every year I am reminded of the beauty of her writing when we read Beloved.

Every year a new paragraph will take my breath away and become yet another annotation of awe. Every year I am grateful for her words and the way they reach into our core.

Thank you, Ms. Morrison. —Melissa Smith

Teaching Beloved to my AP English Lit students is always one of the highlights of my year. I pair the novel with excerpts from Nell Irvin Painter's Soul Murder and Slavery, and this allows students to really contemplate how important one's own sense of humanity is and how cruel the denying of it would be. My kids study slavery in their history classes, but I don't think they are fully able to comprehend just how dehumanizing the institution of slavery was (and just how dehumanizing the ideology of racism is today). Given the shooting in El Paso just days ago, I think books like Beloved are more important than ever. Morrison was a great writer, not just because she wrote eloquently, with images and characters that leap off the page, but because she asked her readers to empathize. Why would a slave mother kill her child? By the end of the book, most of my students understand why, and this makes me happy because I know that they will go out into the world respecters of all humanity. —Jennifer Ferretter

I have not taught Sula, but the opening to that novel provides a richly accessible way to introduce students to deconstructive literary theory. In the virtuoso opening riff to that novel, Morrison reveals the instability and contingency of the seemingly clear-cut opposition "top" and "bottom."

She also dramatizes the implication of power and language in that opening.

When teaching the moment in The Great Gatsby when Tom frames Daisy and Gatsby's affair as akin to "intermarriage between black and white," I have found it very productive to introduce students to some of the provocative passages in Playing in the Dark where Morrison cogently argues that race inevitably is the subtext to American literature, even when (especially when?) it is not the ostensible focus.

What a powerful writer and complex thinker she was. —Stephen da Silva

I enrolled in a Black Studies course in college that concentrated on African American authors. It was in this course that I read Jazz and Sula.

And I must say that Toni Morrison's books helped me to deeply understand how imperfect our society was, how brazen and shameless it had been to Black communities over the centuries. Her books were dazzling: they combined lyrical beauty and complexity, painting a world unlike anything I had ever experienced. They challenged language as much as they challenged my understanding of plot, characters, and other literary devices. In all, Morrison was a genius, a master at storytelling, and I cannot be more thankful for her contributions to American literature, for her works spoke the harsh truth of what it means to be a man and woman of color in this country. American literature would not be what it is today without her writings. —Mario Rosado

Single-handedly, Toni Morrison altered my life's path.

She introduced me to the beauty of language and literature when I first read The Bluest Eye in my AP Literature class. It was amidst reading and reflecting in that text that I realized I wanted to teach English and dive into the reading-writing connection in my own classroom. I will be student teaching this fall, and hope to introduce a few students to the magnetic draw of her writing. —Allison McKenna

Mentoring is a Must "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. This is not just a grab bag candy game."—Toni Morrison —Anna J. Small Roseboro

I didn’t know much about Toni Morrison’s work until I started teaching AP Literature, but I have been hooked ever since! I have an entire shelf in my classroom devoted to her excellent writing and must have multiple copies of Beloved and Sula to satisfy my students’ Toni Morrison fix. One of my AP trainers said, “If you teach only one book the entire year, it should be Sula.” Hands down, he was correct!

—Sheridan Steelman

What a wonderful illustrator and collector of thoughts, emotions, and verbal expressions. I have expanded the thoughts of Toni Morrison’s literature with my students, friends, and family members for decades. I have found treasures that I thought no one else would know—but they did. I have found that she spoke about race without letting others know the race of her characters—what a gift. She has helped me demonstrate cultural diversity within my classroom through thoughts and expressive vocabulary and emotions. She will be remembered and cherished by many.

—Darya Owens

Reading Toni Morrison's novels inspired me to develop a course in my college entitled “Writing and Singing the Blues,” which I have taught annually for almost two decades.

Her clear voice and powerful stories will outlive her, but she will be missed by me and by many. Introducing her to students is one of the joys of my professional life.

—Sister Rita Yeasted, SFCC

When I teach African American literature, Beloved is consistently the work that sparks the greatest admiration of the students, and it rekindles my admiration every time I re-read it. Toni Morrison's world perspective came home to me back in the 1970s when I heard her give a talk. During the question period, someone asked what her favorite book was. She immediately responded, “Anna Karenina," then paused a moment and said, "No, One Hundred Years of Solitude." —Gene Hammond

I teach American Literature, and many of my students have read and analyzed Toni Morrison's works for independent research projects. Her books provide an important doorway that allows students to discuss racial discrimination. Her characters are fully human— strong and weak, skilled and flawed, honest and deceitful—AND they happen to be Black. These fully dimensional portrayals help students to consider the role that race plays in society and how that role affects minority groups.

—Jeanine Brown

I attended predominantly white schools for high school and college.

When I discovered Toni Morrison, she became my hero. She told stories about women and heroines that looked like me and had experiences that resonated with me. Toni Morrison helped me to see that our stories as women, Black folks, and just as humans were relevant and important. The basis of her stories allowed me to experience her stories in a more meaningful way. Toni Morrison's style of writing helped me to share the pain and the joy of her protagonists and to gain understanding of the complexities of our world.

The literary world has experienced a great loss, but the world is a better place because she lived and shared her gifts and talents with us.

Toni Morrison made me proud to be a young Black woman, and she will always be a hero for me. I will miss her wisdom and her passion for life. —Ida B. Malloy

One word with which to aptly describe the artistic gravitas of Toni Morrison, whose seismic passing on August 5, 2019, if memory serves me accurately, is "Awesome." One always came to any of the works of Ms. Morrison with the same level of seriousness and awe that I attended my high school math and physics classes. Her command of the English language was well beyond sheer mastery, it was solemn and worshipful. Every page of her writings, especially her epic novels, of course, invited the same exegetical rumination with which an avid devotee went to the Christian Bible. In pugilistic or sports terms, her works were as intellectually empowering as seeing the equally iconic and legendary Cassius Clay—aka Muhammad Ali—floor an opponent, especially if that opponent in question also happened to be non-African American or one of the haughty scions of our former slave masters and human chattel owners.

—Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe

Each year I watch students struggle with the discomfort of what to do with Ruth’s character in Song of Solomon. They don't know how to feel. They question Milkman and his assessment of Hagar as the “third beer.” “Guitar and the Seven Days” challenges their comfort, their understanding, and their idea of what is right. Every year they marvel at how perspective shifts and all you once knew gets shadowed in doubt. They join Pilate in questioning what is true. They marvel at Guitar's wisdom over what it means to love, and they cry at the astonishing ending. More than any other work that I teach, this novel opens their minds, challenges their beliefs, expands their empathy, and enlightens them. This one novel helps all of us to be better humans, and I have the privilege of experiencing this every year.

—Moira Spillane

Each time my students and I investigate Toni Morrison's works, I find a new connection and/or societal issue to expound on. In my most recent endeavors, I found myself using her work Beloved specifically to create a safe space for discussing mental and psychological vulnerabilities often overlooked. It also paves the way for conversations around fighting out of fear, superstition, and long-term effects of abuse (PTSD). As an educator, Morrison's authorship works well for my classroom because it utilizes and celebrates cultural language, traditions, and behaviors while mixing in the very real commonality of human distress between races, cultures, and other groups of people. Not so subtly, she reminds us that the plight of the Black man goes beyond racial tensions. In addition to my personal and professional libraries, she will remain a part of my classroom instruction. Through us, her literary blessings live on! —Albertia Burgess

The passing of Toni Morrison came as a surprise because it had not occurred to me that she would leave this world so soon. I have read her books and short stories for many years. As an African American youth, I enjoyed reading her work for its authentic perspective of what life was like in our culture. As an English teacher, I enjoyed sharing her works with students as a bridge to understanding race, culture, and what it means to be human. So, the fact that she is now gone, and cannot create another story, is sad indeed. However, the work she leaves behind is so stunning, beautiful, and rich in literary texture that I know I'll continue to have fun sharing her words with students for years to come. —Trudie Lynch

Morrison helped me, as an Southern expatriate living in the Pacific Northwest, discover a seemingly unrepresented perspective in the literature of the South. Many of her characters are poor, Black, and female, offering profound observations from the fringes of American society. Morrison's prose has been essential to my understanding of American and Southern culture, and crucial to anyone's holistic view of the United States.

Voices in her work demand a far-reaching empathy that many of her author predecessors are unable to conjure. Morrison's art is crucial to our view of America and its literary history. Going forward, her impact on American stories will always be felt. Returning to the South after years of living away, and after reading just a few of her works, I knew the place and its people more intimately—with the heavy weight of past and future. —Liam Conway-Nesson

In May, I sent my principal an email asking if it's possible to teach a Toni Morrison unit in the high school. At that time I didn't have any information pulled together for the unit; it was a work in progress in my mind, and I knew I wanted to expose the students to Ms. Morrison's depth and greatness.

A colleague and I went to see the documentary of her life at Lincoln Center last month. Yesterday, I wept because she's gone.

Over the years, I've probably read 95% of her work and watched everything I could find. In my mind, she is my great-aunt, my Auntie Mame!

Her body of work is enough for me, but I'm most sad because I'll never get to meet her and express my joy for her words. —Carol Johnson

Toni Morrison's words, works, and wisdom have demonstrated to me that the classroom is an ideological hotbed of varying beliefs, yet through the tensions brought up in her respective works come truly transformative discussions. Her works demarcate the pervasive and problematic hardships of the past, but also illuminate the powers of the domineering human spirit and effects of forgiveness. Altogether, Morrison lives on in the lives of not only the readers who care deeply about her unfiltered and unadulterated subject matter but also the teachers who instruct these works with dignity, with grace, and with a willingness to push their students to new heights. —Daniel Charlton

I told my students that Toni Morrison was my first exposure to African American literature. That when I read Beloved, I changed as a person and as a reader. I teach her short story "Recitatif" each year as a part of my opening unit for my AP Literature seniors. Every year the students remember this story, and I can see in their faces the deep contemplation it produces in regards to assumptions, bias, and ambiguity. Last year, I suggested that a student read some of what she wrote, and that student said the work The Bluest Eye changed HER as a reader, and had the same effect on her that I remembered Beloved having on me. To have this impact generation after generation is the legacy that Toni Morrison has left on our classrooms and our cultures. We need her presence in our classrooms, and I will continue to honor her work personally and professionally. —Erica Davis

I know to most people she was just an author, but she was so much more to me. Without ever knowing me, Toni Morrison changed my life. Her works moved me in ways that were difficult and painful, but they also inspired both my personal and professional lives. I wanted to become a Morrison scholar when I was predissertation, but I realized how many Morrison scholars there already were—second to Shakespeare at that time. I wanted to make myself marketable in order to compete, so I focused on the lesser-known women writers; but Morrison’s influence was apparent everywhere. Whether it was her fiction, speeches, or scholarship, I always found her remarkable, poignant, and wise. She is ingrained into my pedagogy and into my own philosophical outlook. She informs every course I teach, be it literature or rhetoric. From Morrison's works, I've learned that confronting "uncomfortable truths" can be both frightening and enlightening. She will live forever in my heart, my work, and on my bookshelves. —Terri Pantuso

I was teaching at a large community college in Florida when Ms. Morrison won the Nobel Prize for Literature. I remember making the announcement in my literature classes that day and asking if any of the students could name one of her books. When I realized they could not, I scrapped the novel that was already listed on my syllabus and replaced it with Beloved. It was the best teaching decision I made that year. —Deborah Byrd

Working in the inner city comes with its own problems. Many of my students suffer from abject poverty, neglect, and low selfesteem. Toni Morrison's novels resonate with students, who are engaged to read by topics they can relate to in many ways. The Bluest Eye narrows down the feeling of being marginalized in a world that treasures European beauty standards while negating Brown and Black children. My students related to the main character. Beloved is a story of many layers and suspenseful. My students related to the supernatural elements and the story of anguish and triumph and forgiveness. Toni Morrison's own words about writers of color have also inspired my students. She truly was a national treasure and she meant the world to us. —Kalua Lauber

I was able to teach a lesson on her short story “Recitatif” to my high school seniors. We were able to have a discourse on race relations and the importance of talking about race in the classroom. One of my students spoke up about how Morrison’s words spoke to her like no other author had done. She had cried for the characters as they grew up. It was one of the first pieces this particular student read in all her high school career all the way through.

Morrison made discourse about race relations so easy. Her words spoke to me personally through her novel Sula and through “Recitatif.” I will continue to use Morrison’s work for years to come.

I truly think she is one of the authors that should be read in all high school classrooms.

—Alisa Maxwell

Dr. Toni Morrison bridges generations with her poetic and historic voice. What a legacy she leaves for readers of all ages at a time where “lest we forget” addresses critical social justice and educational needs beyond the script. Her work is like a call to action.

—Jeri Johnson