- The first African-American woman to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature.
- Awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama on 29 May 2012.
- Was a graduate of Howard and Cornell universities.
- Was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993.
- Daughter of Ramah (Willis), from Greenville, Alabama, and George Wofford, from Cartersville, Georgia, and granddaughter of a slave.
- Graduated from Lorain High School, Lorain, Ohio, Class of 1949
- Member of the jury at the Cannes Film Festival in 2005
- In an interview in Latrell Sprewell/Whose Chemical Weapons?/Toni Morrison (1998), she mentions that her father had experienced such horrific racism that he considered himself superior to white people.
- Has 2 sons.
- Was a professor of humanities at Princeton University.
- Worked as a book editor at Random House in New York.
- Won a Pulitzer Prize for "Beloved" and a National Book Critics Circle award for "Song of Solomon".
- Honorary member of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority Inc.
- Inducted into the New Jersey Hall of Fame in 2008 (inaugural class) in the category Arts & Letters.
- Has three grandchildren.
- Pictured on a nondenominated USA commemorative postage stamp issued 7 March 2023. Price on day of issue was 63¢.
- The National Endowment for the Humanities selected Morrison for the Jefferson Lecture, the U.S. federal government's highest honor for achievement in the humanities, in 1996.
- Morrison was interviewed by Margaret Busby in London for a 1988 documentary film by Sindamani Bridglal, entitled Identifiable Qualities, shown on Channel 4.
- Her novel Beloved was made into a film in 1998.
- Morrison's first play, Dreaming Emmett, is about the 1955 murder by white men of Black teenager Emmett Till. The play was commissioned by the New York State Writers Institute at the State University of New York at Albany, where she was teaching at the time. It was produced in 1986 by Capital Repertory Theatre and directed by Gilbert Moses.
- She was honored in 1996 with the National Book Foundation's Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.
- Morrison became the first black female editor in fiction at Random House in New York City in the late 1960s.
- Morrison was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 2020.
- In November 2006, Morrison visited the Louvre museum in Paris as the second in its "Grand Invité" program to guest-curate a month-long series of events across the arts on the theme of "The Foreigner's Home", about which The New York Times said: "In tapping her own African-American culture, Ms. Morrison is eager to credit 'foreigners' with enriching the countries where they settle.".
- Toni Morrison became a Catholic at the age of 12 and took the baptismal name Anthony (after Anthony of Padua), which led to her nickname, Toni.
- In 2021, Cornell University opened Toni Morrison Hall, a 178,869 square-foot residence hall and Morrison Dining in 2022, an adjacent dining hall designed by ikon.5 Architects.
- In 2019, Timothy Greenfield-Sanders' documentary Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. People featured in the film include Morrison, Angela Davis, Oprah Winfrey, Sonia Sanchez, and Walter Mosley, among others.
- Morrison was the subject of a film titled Imagine - Toni Morrison Remembers, directed by Jill Nicholls and shown on BBC One television on July 15, 2015, in which Morrison talked to Alan Yentob about her life and work.
- Her son Slade Morrison died of pancreatic cancer on December 22, 2010, when Morrison was halfway through writing her novel Home. She stopped work on the novel for a year or two before completing it; that novel was published in 2012.
- Morrison was a member of the editorial advisory board of The Nation, a magazine started in 1865 by Northern abolitionists.
- In 2019, a resolution was passed in her hometown of Lorain, Ohio, to designate February 18, her birthday, as Toni Morrison Day. Additional legislation was introduced to also proclaim that date as "Toni Morrison Day" throughout the State of Ohio. The legislation, HB 325, was passed by the Ohio House of Representatives on December 2, 2020, and signed into law by Governor Mike DeWine on December 21.
- In 1996, television talk-show host Oprah Winfrey selected Song of Solomon for her newly launched Book Club, which became a popular feature on her Oprah Winfrey Show.[64] An average of 13 million viewers watched the show's book club segments. As a result, when Winfrey selected Morrison's earliest novel The Bluest Eye in 2000, it sold another 800,000 paperback copies.
- A memorial tribute was held on November 21, 2019, at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of Manhattan in New York City. Morrison was eulogized by, among others, Oprah Winfrey, Angela Davis, Michael Ondaatje, David Remnick, Fran Lebowitz, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Edwidge Danticat. The jazz saxophonist David Murray performed a musical tribute.
- The Toni Morrison Papers are part of the permanent library collections of Princeton University, where they are held in the Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections. Morrison's decision to offer her papers to Princeton instead of to her alma mater Howard University was criticized by some within the historically black colleges and universities community.
- In 2016, Oberlin College received a grant to complete a documentary film begun in 2014, The Foreigner's Home, about Morrison's intellectual and artistic vision, explored in the context of the 2006 exhibition she guest-curated at the Louvre. The film's executive producer was Jonathan Demme. It was directed by Oberlin College Cinema Studies faculty Geoff Pingree and Rian Brown, and incorporates footage shot by Morrison's first-born son Harold Ford Morrison, who also consulted on the film.
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