Toni Morrison stopped by for a chill chat about race, pigeonholing and the time she was taken aback by her own written words on Wednesday night's edition of The Colbert Report. "Is your entire literary career a midlife crisis?" Stephen Colbert asked. » 11/20/14 1:30pm 11/20/14 1:30pm

Rutgers has added a summer course on Contemporary Black Women Writers, less than two weeks after an uproar over the fact that the university was paying Snooki a higher speaking fee than Toni Morrison. (Morrison, of course, is on the syllabus.) » 4/13/11 3:45pm 4/13/11 3:45pm

The news that Snooki was paid $2,000 more than Nobel prize-winning author Toni Morrison to speak at Rutgers University last week was taken as another sign of Civilization's general decline. But high literature isn't going down without a fight. » 4/03/11 5:30pm 4/03/11 5:30pm

http://youtu.be/ee1C5FB3ceoAt least, in Jersey! » 4/01/11 3:21pm 4/01/11 3:21pm

Last night, I asked Angela Davis how she felt about the way her image has been used over the years. "Capitalism!" someone in the audience said dryly. Her answer was a little more nuanced. » 10/28/10 1:17pm 10/28/10 1:17pm

Indiana high school students had to quit reading Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon Wednesday, because administrators were offended by its "sex, violence, and profanity." Here's why this is bullshit. » 4/30/10 2:40pm 4/30/10 2:40pm

In response to the banning of her novel, Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison helped launch the Free Speech Leadership Council yesterday. Of literacy, she said: "[it is] the route out of any oppression, any limitation." [AP & Mediabistro] » 6/05/09 11:20am 6/05/09 11:20am

In a new video just up on the NY Times' "Paper Cuts" book blog, editor Sam Tanenhaus talks with Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison about her new book, A Mercy, and President-elect Barack Obama. Morrison compliments Obama's facility as a writer — "the beauty of his language," as she calls it — and ruminates on… » 11/28/08 3:30pm 11/28/08 3:30pm

Toni Morrison on her Election Day experience » 11/07/08 1:20pm 11/07/08 1:20pm: "I was too anxious and I didn't want to be in anybody's company. But I was totally in the dark when someone called to say he won. My computer crashed and the TV didn't work. This morning I didn't know how tense I was but I felt this relief like something was lifted. Even…

Esquire » 9/19/08 4:40pm 9/19/08 4:40pm put up a slideshow of , and it is indeed a very good list. However, it's a very good list that's also extremely myopic. It relies way too heavily on the old white dude cannon (particularly the WASP angst end of it) with books by Updike, Cheever, Kingsley Martin Amis, Hemingway, McPhee, Joyce, Roth, Mailer,…

Former New York Times » 8/26/08 3:20pm 8/26/08 3:20pm film critic Elvis Mitchell teamed up with acclaimed photographer and filmmaker Timothy Greenfield-Sanders on , a series of "living portraits" conceived by Mitchell as an "answer to the persistent taint that western culture has applied to the word "black.'" (Volume 1 of the series premiered last…

Toni Morrison would like to clear some stuff up about her now-famous anointment of Bill Clinton as the 'first black President'. She says: "I was deploring the way [he] was being treated, vis-à-vis the sex scandal that was surrounding him. I said he was being treated like a black on the street, already guilty, already… » 5/08/08 12:45pm 5/08/08 12:45pm

Here is Barack Obama with renowned ruddy ladykiller Ted Kennedy. Ted is kind of a dick, but so was Suharto, and yet he had his good points too, as Barack learned when he was a little kid and Suharto seized power from the democratically-elected Sukarno in a US-assisted miltary coup and Barack's stepdad, an officer in… » 1/28/08 10:00am 1/28/08 10:00am