Shange began her literary career as a poet and performer. Strongly influenced by jazz, she sometimes performed improvisational poetry at bars in New York and San Francisco. One such piece, a collection of twenty poems performed with dance and music by a group of seven women, impressed a New York theater director so much that he worked with Shange to develop it into an off-Broadway production in 1975. For colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf quickly became a controversial sensation. The "choreopoem," as Shange terms this experimental work, was shocking to audiences not only for its unusual theatrical form, but for its outspoken message about the double oppression of black women.

The play addresses rape, wife-beating, and single motherhood in the most raw and personal terms. "The work speaks of the physical and emotional abuse that black women experience at the hands...