Toni Morrison: The Last Interview

A wide-ranging collection of talks with the beloved author finds her refreshingly candid about her books and her life, race and misogyny, and more.

In this generous collection of thought-provoking interviews -- including her first and last -- the author Barack Obama called a "national treasure" talks with a wide variety of people, from Charlayne Hunter-Gault and Bill Moyers to obscure bloggers. She details not only her writing life and her influences, but also her other careers as a teacher, and as a publisher, as well as the gripping story of her family.

About the Author

Toni Morrison was born in Lorain, Ohio, in 1931. After graduating from Howard University, and getting a masters at Cornell University, she became an English professor at Texas Southern University. When her marriage to Harold Morrison broke up in 1964, leaving her with their two sons, she got a job at Random House as the company's first African-American editor. She would work with many notable authors, including Angela Davis, Muhammad Ali, and Toni Cade Bambara.

In 1970 Morrison published her own first novel, The Bluest Eye, which was extremely well-received. Her third novel, Song of Solomon, won the National Book Critics Circle Award. She would go on to write several more novels--perhaps most notably, Beloved--as well as plays and poetry, and was awarded the Noble Prize in Literature IN 1993. She died in 2019. Poet and activist Nikki Giovanni first came to fame as one of the founders of the Black Arts Movement in the 1960s. The author of numerous books of poetry as well as several children's books, she has won numerous awards, including a Grammy nomination for a POETRY record. One of Oprah Winfrey's 25 "Living Legends," Giovanni is University Distinguished Professor at Virginia Tech.