Chloe Anthony Wofford Morrison, or as we all have come to know and love her, Toni Morrison, was an American novelist, essayist, college professor, and editor active throughout the later 20th and early 21st centuries. Throughout the course of her career, Toni won a plethora of awards for her work, including the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993 (of which she was the first African-American woman to receive and upon hearing the news over the telephone thought her friend was just drunk), a Pulitzer Prize in 1988 for her groundbreaking novel, Beloved, the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012, the National Endowment for the Humanities in 1996, and MANY, many more. Morrison was one of the rare American authors whose books were both critical and commercial successes – Oprah was literally her number one fan, of which we will discuss later, and when it came to her own writing, Morrison was the author of 11 novels as well as children’s books and essay collections. Her work focused on themes of black American experience: in an unjust society, her characters struggle to find themselves and their cultural identity, and her use of fantasy, sinuous poetic style, and rich interweaving of the mythic gave her stories incredible strength and texture. As an editor and collaborator, she worked with everyone from Angela Davis to Muhammad Ali, utilizing her efforts to make black voices heard not just in America, but around the world, thus playing a vital role in bringing black literature into the mainstream. Toni was a force to be reckoned with – she was a single mother, an activist, a creator, an educator, and an adversary to those wishing to turn a blind eye to the systemic racism embedded in our American society, and in addition to all that, apparently made a damn good carrot cake. I could go on for hours about how fucking rad this woman was, but instead, let’s just get this episode going and talk all things Toni Morrison, one of the most influential figures in the literary community in the last one hundred years.