For colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf (1975), Shange's groundbreaking "choreopoem" play, combines poetry, music, and dance to explore relationships between black men and women. This work, considerably more experimental than Betsey Brown, established Shange's international reputation.

Shange's first novel, Sassafrass, Cypress and Indigo (1985), uses prose, poetry, letters, and recipes to portray the lives of three sisters, each of them a different kind of artist, as they confront dilemmas relating to love, feminism, racial politics, and art.

Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959), by Paule Marshall, tells the story of a young Caribbean-American girl growing up in New York and learning about who she is in relation to her family, background, neighborhood, and the big city beyond.

Gloria Naylor's Linden Hills (1985) is named for the affluent black suburb where its main characters, two writers, reside. In this novel Naylor...