In the following essay, Mitchell discusses Shange's choreopoem in terms of how it portrays an African American woman's perspective of the city.

In the following essay, Waxman discusses the novels of Paule Marshall, Alice Walker, and Ntozake Shange in terms of the ways in which they incorporate dance forms and metaphors into their representations of African American women.

In the following essay, Geis discusses Shange's use of language as an expression of African American women's experience in her performance pieces.

In the following interview, Lyons questions Shange about the various criticisms of her work that have been launched by feminists, and about her own perspective on the role of gender in her writing.

A gutsy, down-to-earth poet, Ntozake Shange gives voice to the ordinary experiences of Black women in frank, simple, vivid language, telling the colored girl's story in her own speech patterns. Shange's gift is an uncanny ability to bring the experience of being Black and a woman to life. Those who hear or read her choreopoem for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf may feel overwhelmed by so much reality, so much pain, so much resiliency, so much life force. Th...

In the following book review, White praises both Jamaica Kincaid's novel Annie John and Shange's novel Betsey Brown for their representations of young African American women.

There are as many ways of looking at Ntozake Shange's For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf as there are hues in a rainbow. One can take it as an initiation piece…. Colored Girls also might be seen as a black feminist statement in that it offers a black woman's movement. Still another approach is to view it as a literary coming-of-age of black womanhood in the form of a series of testimonies which, in Shange's words, "explore the realitie...

The text of Miss Shange's "Mother Courage" … raises some troubling questions. What are an adapter's responsibilities to the original work? What are a playwright's obligations to history? Is it right to call a play "Mother Courage" when it in many ways violates the spirit of the drama we associate with that title? The motivations behind Miss Shange's adaptation may well be pure, but the result is a case study of what can happen when an exercise i...

In the following review of Shange's novel Liliane, Elkind praises the way in which Shange, through her central character, "fleshes out … the complexities that Black women face in America, the divergent demands of feminism and the traditional roles of women in the Black community."

In the following review of Liliane, Sayers praises the collage structure of the narrative which combines conversations between Liliane and her psychotherapist with a first-person narrative by Liliane, her friends, and her lovers.

Woddis critiques a production of Ntozake Shange's play Spell No. 7 performed by the Women's Playhouse Trust.

In the following review of Liliane, Neilen praises the structure of the novel, which interweaves the main character's therapy sessions with the perspectives of her friends and lovers. She emphasizes that Liliane, although subject to racism and sexism, "emerges triumphant, able to forgive and forge a future that encompasses both art and love."

[In For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf,] Ntozake Shange sets out to evoke the plight of black women and at the same time somehow to celebrate them and their triumphs in life through a series of monologues, usually taken straight by one of the seven players, sometimes illustrated by one while another speaks. She sees herself very much as a poet, and that may well be the case. But she is farthest from proving it when she most desperately strains to do so. Which, unfortunate...

Ntozake Shange, equally untalented as a poet and as a playwright, seems to have made it on the strength of being a black and a woman. Belonging to one formerly underprivileged class is an advantage; to two, a gold mine. Further, she thrives on the gap between poetry and drama. Poetry publishers may just think that she has solid achievements as a dramatist; if the drama critics raved about her For Colored Girls …, it was partly because they labored under the delusion that anything so sprawling, preten...

The poetry of perception is not the same as the poetry of drama. In ""For Colored Girls," Ntozake Shange arranged her acid and lyrical perceptions into a fine, loose-jointed set of meditations and sketches. They had the design and rhythm of a song-cycle; the pieces were funny, exuberant or acrid, and Miss Shange's remarkable poetic diction took the role of music in binding them together. Themes would appear and reappear, but a formal dramatic structure was not attempted or needed...

Poetry is as contagious as poison ivy though less prevalent. Look at the response these days to the dramatic poems in Ntozake Shange's remarkable "Spell No. 7."… [The] sketches—lyrical, wry, painful and comically prosaic by turn—… invaded the audience. The place was alive with response, but it wasn't the ordinary applause or laughter of an audience that is pleased or moved. There was a kind of rumination, a repeating of lines, even a few tentative essa...

Adaptations of classics are often based on a simple transfer in period; costumes and accents change, but almost everything else remains the same. In direct contrast, Ntozake Shange's new version of Brecht's "Mother Courage and Her Children,"… is a true cultural and political transplant…. [Miss Shange] has moved the play from Europe during the Thirty Years' War in the early 17th century to the American frontier during the Reconstruction in the late 19th centur...

[Ntozake] Shange's wit, her fierce anger, her sensuality and, most of all, her masterful, surprising use of language were of such potency that they bestrode, not only the Atlantic, but the gulf between her race and mine. nappy edges, Shange's latest book of poetry resumes a great many of the themes of for colored girls …: love, lust, music, friendship, the condition of being a woman, of being black. It even contains three or four of the earlier poems, in a slightly altered form…....

Good is good, theater is theater and Shange's work ["For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf"] is the kind the stage was created for. There is Ntozake Shange 1948– Photograph © 1982 by Jill Krementzno comparing the trust and presence of its power with any other kind of art in any other medium (nor any need or sense in comparison anyhow). The show … [contains] the author...

Miss Shange was content to ruin one genre at a time, say poetry or drama. Now, [in Mother Courage and Her Children], she rewrites and makes ridiculous both American history and Bertolt Brecht at one foul swoop. Brecht plausibly perceived the Thirty Years' War as a nasty excuse for otherwise identical people who happened to be Protestants or Catholics to slaughter one another while ruthless and purblind speculators, such as the vivandière Mother Courage, made and lost their boodle, lost and los...

[Ntozake Shange's For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf] is a comfortably loose-strung series of portraits and narratives about women, black women…. (p. 36) Blisteringly funny, fragile, droll and funky, lyrical, git down stompish, the play celebrates survival. The portraits are not case studies of stunning wrecks hollering about paid dues and criminal overcharges. The pieces are not booze-based blues and ballads about lost love and missing teeth. The Shange bra...

Ntozake Shange's "Spell #7" is black magic. It is a celebration of blackness, the joy and pride along with the horror of it. It is a shout, a cry, a bitter laugh, a sneer. It is an extremely fine theater piece. The word that best describes Shange's works, which are not plays in the traditional sense, is power. Drama is inherent in each of her poetic sentences because the words hum with a vibrant urgency that shriek to be absorbed now, now, NOW! She writes as though there is not a...

In the following review of "I Live in Music," the reviewer emphasizes the musical elements of the poems and makes note of the "mixed-media art" by Bearden which complements the poems.

Ntozake Shange's latest musical work … is a workshop production, and it looks it. "Spell #7: A Geechee Quick Magic Trance Manual" is a fecund garden that badly needs trimming. Curiously, the weaker scenes in this musical essay appear to be edited far better than the strong numbers. The best scenes are diluted by Shange's attempts to say one thing in many different forms as she can. This musical evening is set in a bar-restaurant hangout for black theatrical performers. Alt...

Ntozake Shange's "Nappy Edges" is too long a book; there are far too many poems that borrow from and reflect upon popular culture without dramatizing the inner conflicts of many of Miss Shange's characters. But she is a highly literate writer, capable of expressing anger at the mistreatment of women by means of an artful reference to some popular song or a scene from a movie. [The] idiom is at once dramatic and restrained, but Miss Shange seldom offers insights as literate as tho...