She also penned novels including Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo (1982), Liliane (1994), and Betsey Brown (1985), about an African-American girl run away from home.

As a result of the Brown v. Board of Education court decision, Shange was bused to a white school where she endured racism and racist attacks.

[7] While growing up with her family in Trenton, Shange attended poetry readings with her younger sister Wanda (now known as the playwright Ifa Bayeza).

[8] These poetry readings fostered an early interest for Shange in the South in particular, and the loss it represented to young Black children who migrated to the North with their parents.

[6] When Shange was 13, she returned to Lawrence Township, Mercer County, New Jersey,[9] where she graduated in 1966 from Trenton Central High School.

[11] Shange graduated cum laude in American Studies, then earned a master's degree in the same field from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.

This play, her most famous work, was a 20-part choreopoem — a term Shange coined to describe her groundbreaking dramatic form, combining of poetry, dance, music, and song[18] — that chronicled the lives of women of color in the United States.

7, a 1979 choreopoem that explores the Black experience,[19] and an adaptation of Bertolt Brecht's Mother Courage and Her Children (1980), which won an Obie Award.

While there, she wrote the ekphrastic poetry collection Ridin' the Moon in Texas: Word Paintings and served as thesis advisor for poet and playwright Annie Finch.

[24] Shange edited The Beacon Best of 1999: creative writing by women and men of all colors (Beacon Press, ISBN 978-0-8070-6221-0), which featured the work of Dorothy Allison, Junot Díaz, Rita Dove, Louise Erdrich, Martín Espada, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Ha Jin, Jamaica Kincaid, Barbara Kingsolver, Yusef Komunyakaa, Hanif Kureishi, Marjorie Sandor, John Edgar Wideman, and others.

[25] In 2003, Shange wrote and oversaw the production of Lavender Lizards and Lilac Landmines: Layla's Dream while serving as a visiting artist at the University of Florida, Gainesville.

Shange was married twice: to the jazz saxophonist David Murray and the painter McArthur Binion, Savannah's father, with both marriages ending in divorce.