EpiphanyForChange

A young and beautiful Chloe Wofford who would later rename herself Toni Morrison. Before the world knew her as Toni Morrison, she was Chloe Anthony Wofford, a young girl growing up in Lorain, Ohio. Born in 1931, she was raised in a working-class family whose parents had migrated north from the South. Her father and mother filled their home with stories, music, and a strong sense of Black history and culture, influences that would remain visible throughout her writing. Morrison developed a love of books early in life and became an exceptional student. She graduated from Lorain High School with honors in 1949 and went on to Howard University, where she studied English and the classics. It was during this period that she began using the name Toni. Anthony had been the name she chose at baptism, and Toni eventually became the nickname by which the literary world would know her. After Howard, she earned a master's degree in English from Cornell University and began teaching. She later became an editor at Random House, where she played an important role in bringing the work of Black writers to a wider audience. Her own first novel, *The Bluest Eye*, was published in 1970, when she was 39. Morrison would go on to write some of the most influential novels in American literature, including *Sula*, *Song of Solomon*, *Beloved* and *Jazz*. Her work placed Black lives, memory, womanhood, family, trauma and history at the center of stories that had often been pushed to the margins. In 1988, *Beloved* won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and in 1993 she became the first Black woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature. The young woman pictured here could not yet know where her love of language would take her. But the imagination, discipline and curiosity she developed in Lorain