95 years ago, on February 18, 1931, Chloe Wofford was born on the shores of Lake Erie in Lorain, Ohio.
Over the course of 88 years—as an editor at Random House, as a professor at Princeton, as a scholar of influential literary criticism in works such as Playing in the Dark, and most especially as the author of 11 groundbreaking novels—the writer we now know as Toni Morrison went on to reshape American Literature.
In 1993, upon becoming the first African American woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, Toni Morrison said in her acceptance speech:
Word-work is sublime […] because it is generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference—the way in which we are like no other life.
We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.
By any measure, Toni Morrison is one of the greatest writers of the last century. Perhaps the greatest, which is why those of us in Ohio feel especially proud that she was not only born and raised here, but that she wrote extensively about the state. Her debut novel, The Bluest Eye, is set in her hometown of Lorain. Sula takes place in a fictional Ohio city named Medallion. And her most acclaimed work, Beloved, is set in Cincinnati on the banks of the Ohio River. As she once said at a speech in Lorain: “In my work, no matter where it’s set […] the imaginative process always starts right here on the lip of Lake Erie.” That is why from February 18, 2026 to February 18, 2027, Ohio will spend a full year celebrating the life, literature, and legacy of Toni Morrison.
Literary Cleveland and Ohio Humanities along with more than five dozen organizations will hold programs in every part of the state for kids and adults, students and teachers, individuals and families, readers and writers, lifelong Morrison fans and those new to her work.
Events include readings and talks by authors such as Hanif Abdurraqib and Namwali Serpell about Toni Morrison’s influence, book club discussions and academic classes centered on her novels and literary criticism, tours of historical locations in Cincinnati and Lorain connected to Beloved and The Bluest Eye, library story hours and craft workshops for families connected to her seven children’s books, writing workshops and open mics inspired by Morrison’s work, and much more.
This celebration coincides with the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence which makes this a unique time to celebrate this important figure and reflect on American history. And what better way to reflect on that history than by reading all eleven of Toni Morrison’s novels in the historical order in which they are set—from A Mercy in the 1680s and 90s to God Help the Child in the 2000s and 2010s?
The goal is to encourage everyone in Ohio to engage with Toni Morrison’s writing over the course of the next year, to celebrate and highlight her indispensable contributions to our state and nation, to gain a deeper understanding of American history through her literature, to foster dialogue around the themes in Morrison’s work—history and memory, racism and trauma, freedom and justice, motherhood and home, beauty and love—and to lay the groundwork for 2031 when Ohio will lead a national celebration marking the 100th anniversary of Toni Morrison’s birth.
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But what might it mean to read Toni Morrison today?
This is the question that the Cleveland Review of Books, in conjunction with the Rust Belt Humanities Lab, will tackle over the course of the year. Each month, authors, scholars, academics, and comics artists from Hanif Abdurraqib to Rebecca Hall will illuminate Toni Morrison’s life and work in new ways for our new era.
What might it mean to read her work amid declining literacy rates and the rise of book banning? Amid the full scale efforts to revise school curricula, extort higher education, and eliminate academic freedom? Amid the censorship of museum exhibits and the erasure of history from historical sites? Amid the slide from democracy to autocracy, the stifling of dissent and speech, the arrest and harassment of writers? Amid the resurgence of white supremacy as immigrants and refugees are being attacked and civil rights protections are being ignored or revoked as we approach what Nikole Hannah-Jones calls “a second Nadir”? And at the same time, what might it mean to reject such presentism and instead take the long view, to analyze her work and its influence beyond our current moment?
How do we properly assess Toni Morrison legacy and influence? What impact has her literature, scholarship, teaching, and editing had on literature as a whole? And how can we move past the mythos and secular sainthood that has developed to engage with her novels on their own terms, to analyze the language without hyperbole, to see the real human person behind the icon? What excites us most about this project—both the public programs and the CRB publications—is what becomes possible when we (re)engage with close readings of Toni Morrison’s work. What new understanding or insight can be gained? What can it awaken in a reader?
After reading Toni Morrison for the first time in high school, author Jesmyn Ward said: “I was blinded. Struck dumb. Dust in my lungs. Toni Morrison called me out of my wandering, her words, whole sentences, whole paragraphs, speaking to me as none had ever done so before.”
What speaks to us in her work as individuals and as a collective? What connections can we make when we read her work in a community that we couldn’t make reading it alone? What can we do together?
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“Once upon a time there was an old woman. Blind but wise.”
This is the beginning of that same 1993 Nobel acceptance speech about how language is the measure of our lives.
In this once-upon-a-time story, a group of young people visit the old woman to test her or disprove her wisdom by posing a kind of riddle: “Is the bird I am holding living or dead?” Sensing a trick, the woman answers simply, “The bird is in your hands,” placing the responsibility back on the questioners. The young people, feeling this reply itself is a trick, demand a real answer and ask for her wisdom, and as they do their answer itself turns into a story, a kind of music.
“…tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places and in the light. Don’t tell us what to believe, what to fear. Show us belief’s wide skirt and the stitch that unravels fear’s caul.”
We have long admired this Nobel lecture. For one thing, it isn’t a lecture—it’s a story. Given the opportunity to grandstand, to bask in her Nobel victory, Toni Morrison instead deploys her chosen art form: fiction. Rather than make any definitive statements herself she places the old woman and the young people in dialogue so that all statements are contingent, held by the fictional characters rather than Toni Morrison herself. There is a deliberate gap for the reader to interpret, decipher, to fill in.
This gap is essential, she says in a 2011 talk at Princeton printed in The Source of Self-Regard under the title “Invisible Ink”, because reading is a skill and an art in itself. The reader always participates in a text “very like singing: there are the lyrics, the score, and the performance—which is the individual’s contribution to the piece.” That space for the reader to participate, to perform, is what makes it possible to read fiction again and again “confident that attentiveness will always yield wonder.” Ohio Celebrates Toni Morrison is an invitation to practice exactly this kind of attentiveness. Because if there is any author whose work will always yield wonder, it is Toni Morrison.
Through this series of CRB essays, contributors will co-create the literature of Toni Morrison anew. She left gaps for us because her work, like all great literature, is a collaboration. It is “dependent on an active and activated reader who is writing the reading—in invisible ink.”
At the very end of her Nobel lecture, when the young people finish speaking, the old woman remarks on what they created:
“Finally…I trust you now. I trust you with the bird that is not in your hands because you have truly caught it. Look. How lovely it is, this thing we have done—together.”
Matt Weinkam
Matt Weinkam is the Executive Director of Literary Cleveland and a founding editor of Threadcount Magazine. He lives in Cleveland, Ohio.